[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Big Pharma Blocks COVID Vaccines In South Africa

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Major drug companies are blocking efforts by other countries to manufacture COVID vaccines in order to maintain their profit, their huge profits. So South Africa, they're making inroads into mNRA. They're making really inroads into understanding it. We didn't help 'em, you know, the industry that we propped up, Pfizer, Merck, all these, all these folks, you understand taxpayers paid for a lot of this research.
Yeah.
And the US government paid them billions of dollars to deliver and now we're gonna hide it from a third world country who's trying to solve the problem. This is an ugly story, man.
It, it really is. And, you know, the World Health Organization was working with South Africa because they knew the greed here in the United States. And again, it, it, it cannot be stressed enough, we already paid for these vaccines. Everybody thinks, oh, you go there and you get your vaccine for free. You've paid for it with your tax dollars. They're profiting off it because the government's also paying them for every single dose we get. They're making billions of dollars. Profits have never been better. And all we're asking is, can we please get this to the rest of the world? You don't have to send them shipments, give them the, you know, the recipe, basically, tell them how to do it and we can move past this pandemic. And when we have countries like we're dealing with in, in Africa and elsewhere that have a 90% unvaccinated rate.
Yeah, yeah.
There's gonna be variants emerging every three or four months and we're never gonna get past this. This vaccine is the key and we gotta give it to everybody.
Yeah. Yes, we can save your life, South Africa, but you're gonna have to pay for it.
Right.
Yes, we can save your life, but the money that we got from the US taxpayers and we're making these huge profits now on the vaccine, we can't share any of that with you because we can't share anything on our patent. You'd like to think that the feds would say, uh-uh, you'd like to think this administration would say, no way, that Congress would say, no way is that, is that acceptable. But no, they haven't, have they?
No. And, and again, people are dying all over the world. I mean, we still have several thousand dying in the United States per day. And, and we've got these vaccines, Operation Warp Speed, billions of dollars put into it. We own these, the people own these, not these drug companies. And across the board, you see polls showing that American people say give them the vaccines because everybody wants to be over with the pandemic. We want this to be done. But it can't be done until we get the world protected and we're holding it and not protecting 'em. That's a policy choice that we're making.
Yeah. It is a policy choice.

[Ameliajohn]

If there is such a thing as a universal utopia, it would be categorized as a meme. And, like every other meme, it will fight over main memory, whether in ones head or on computers.

[Colin2B]

If there is such a thing as a universal utopia ......

I assume it wouldn’t need to advertise itself.
When you registered you agreed to our terms and conditions, which state no advertising on this site. If you do advertise you will be banned.
Not utopia from your perspective, but it’s ok from ours.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Neoliberalism: From Ronald Reagan to the Gig Economy | Tom Nicholas

Neoliberalism (or neoliberal capitalism) is a term which gets thrown around a lot in cultural and political discourse. Is it often used to describe the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent premierships of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and the adjective "neoliberal" continues to be used as a derogatory phrase in the ongoing Democratic debates in the US. Yet it is also used with reference to the "gig economy" and services such as Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb.

Is neoliberalism, then, simply a synonym for capitalism or is there more to it than that? In this "neoliberalism explained" video, I aim to answer just that.

In this month's episode of What the Theory, I unpack what we mean when we talk about neoliberalism. From the early work of economists such as Milton Friedman (author of Capitalism and Freedom), Friedrich von Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom) and the Mont Pelerin Society, through its implementation by Reagan and Thatcher to its infliction upon countries in the global south as described in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, I undertake a brief history of free-market capitalism and consider some of its consequences.

Unregulated selfish interest tends to be shortsighted, and blind to longer term goals. Imagine a multicellular organism whose individual cells act selfishly by consuming all available resources for themselves, like cancers. It won't survive long enough.
On the other hand, overregulation tends to be too restrictive, hence obstruct creativity and less efficient than it should be. Wrong policies often take too long to correct, usually after huge damages have been made.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Hume came up with is and ought problem. We can analyze the most basic/fundamental solutions to those problems.
Descartes has identified that the first knowledge that a conscious system can possibly have, before anything else, is its own existence at present time. It's the first justification to any further knowledge. In other words the most basic solution for whoever pondering is problem is that there exist at least one conscious entity at present time.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

To get the solution of ought problem, we need additional knowledge on top of the is solution.
Those knowledge are :
- The definitions of ought, which are used to indicate obligation or duty,  advisability or prudence, or desirability.
- What makes something conscious. In other words, the minimum requirements for consciousness.
- The law of causation, a principle in philosophy: every change in nature is produced by some cause.
- The arrow of time. In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future.
- Identification of similarities and differences, especially of conscious entities other than current self.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

When all is said and done, the answers to is and ought problems are respectively,
- There exist at least one conscious entity at present time.
- At least one conscious entity ought to exist in the future.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

When all is said and done, the answers to is and ought problems are respectively,
- There exist at least one conscious entity at present time.

Here's a further justification for the is solution.
If someone is thinking about it, then it is necessarily true. On the other hand, if it were false, then no one will notice it; its falsehood can't be verified.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

- At least one conscious entity ought to exist in the future.

If every conscious entity that exists at present time thinks and acts as if this ought solution is false, then it's likely that all of them will go extinct in the future. In that case, future conscious entities would have to restart from the scratch. All the advantages that currently existing conscious entities have would be meaningless, and become waste of time and energy, seen from the perspective of future conscious entities. It would be considered a failure in achieving efficiency, which is a universal instrumental goal.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

- The law of causation, a principle in philosophy: every change in nature is produced by some cause.
- The arrow of time. In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future.

These two points are made available by the function of dynamic memory. We can only reliably memorize things that already happened. We don't remember things yet to happen. Although some similarities of events may cause deja vu. This work of memory creates the impression of the arrow of time.

Things happen consecutively and reliably made us group them in cause-effect relationships.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

- What makes something conscious. In other words, the minimum requirements for consciousness.

Self representation is necessary for conscious systems, but it alone is not enough. An escape route map with "you are here" sign is an example.
To be conscious, a system must also be dynamic. It responds to environmental changes. But it's still not enough. A pin hole camera in front of a mirror has both properties. But we still don't call it conscious. There must be something else.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

That something else is the ability to learn from experience. As I mentioned it in another thread, learning is not just memorizing things. Otherwise we would call data loggers and audio-video recorder as conscious.
Learning also involves data acquisition, and processing, including filtration and compression, besides data recording.
That data acquisition and filtration would involve discarding irrelevant and inaccurate data. But we must be aware that some data might be irrelevant in some situations, but become important or even necessary in some other situations. Irrelevant data for normal operations may be a key in investigation to find root cause of incidents or to solve criminal cases.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Acquired, processed, and stored data become knowledge, experience, skill, and wisdom which could be useful in achieving the goals of conscious entities. Those things help in making decisions and performing actions, which are essentially making changes to their environments or parts of themselves.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

So, given everything else equal, someone who can swim is more conscious than someone who can't. Someone who speaks foreign languages is more conscious than those who don't. On the other hand, someone who are blind are less conscious than those who can see. Someone who lives in stone age are generally less conscious than their modern descendants.
Those skills, knowledge and wisdom give us more options to determine our future. But since our memory space is naturally limited, we must prioritize those skills and knowledge based on situations we are most likely in.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Consciousness Explained

Using consilience, which is a bottom up perspective, Tom Beakbane explains consciousness and how it evolved. This explanation is the result of developments in many disciplines including genetics, cell biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, neurophysiology and computing. The mechanisms are straightforward and matter-of-fact without any need for any pie-in-the-sky theories.

Credit should go to the many researchers, scientists and thinkers who have been uncovering the many interwoven findings that Tom touches on. The ideas have been assembled from papers, books, podcasts and videos that are too numerous to mention.

Excellent lectures and resources can be found on the Oxford University Museum of Natural History website, and in particular the First Animals lectures here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

A clip from Becoming, a six-minute film by Jan van IJken that shows the miraculous genesis of a transparent egg into a complete, complex living organism, an alpine newt.

The cellular automat are "rule 30" conceived by Stephen Wolfram and explained in the book A New Kind of Science published in 2002.

The diagram of the evolution of the dorsal pallium was taken from this 2020 paper: Variations of telencephalic development that paved the way for neocortical evolution in Progress in Neurobiology

The video describes consciousness in simple and naturalistic way. It doesn't need to conjure esoteric and mystical concepts

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The virtual universe that we are going to build should serve as an instrumental goal towards the universal terminal goal. It must aim for relevance, accuracy, and precision, in that particular order of importance.
Imagine if a billionaire decides to build a supercomputer to calculate the value of π in as many decimal places as possible, and ends up using more than half of computational power and memory space of the world. This endeavor might have high score in accuracy and precision criteria, but less so in relevance to achieving the universal terminal goal.
This prioritization should be kept in mind by anyone trying to build a metaverse, or their own version of virtual universe.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/photos/technology/metaverse-innovations-a-glimpse-of-what-the-virtual-universe-could-look-like-in-future-12242842.htm

The relevance factor is closely related to significance of the information. And they depend on circumstances. For example, for most of us, information about space objects like comet are not that relevant/significant to make decisions. But if someday an interstellar comet as big as Pluto flies by and interacts chaotically with Saturn, Jupiter, and their moon systems, which redirects it toward the earth with expectation to an impact in about a year or so, the information about the comet suddenly becomes much more relevant/significant. Many other goals and information which were highly important would become meaningless.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The aim of science

The aim of science is to produce a relevant, accurate, and precise model of the universe which would serve as instrumental goal to help achieving the universal terminal goal, which is preserving the existence of consciousness into the future.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio

I believe the world is changing in big ways that haven’t happened before in our lifetimes but have many times in history, so I knew I needed to study past changes to understand what is happening now and help me to anticipate what is likely to happen.

I shared what I learned in my book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, and my hope is that this animation gives people an easy way to understand the key ideas from the book in a simple and entertaining way. In the first 18 minutes, you’ll get the gist of what drives the “Big Cycle” of rise and decline of nations through time and where we now are in that cycle. If you give me 20 minutes more to watch the whole thing, and I will show you how the big cycle worked across the last 500 years of history—and what the current world leading power, the United States, needs to do to remain strong.

The video shows what we can learn from history as social structures.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The Problem with Humans, delves into why the Earth’s climate is changing and why we’re not fixing it fast enough. Turns out, humans may not be prepared to meet the moment. Don’t worry, only one bird was hurt in the making of this monologue.

We need to balance between short and long term goals. Failing to achieve short term goals often makes it harder to achieve long term goals. But circumstances change all the time. Some short term goals which in some situations help the achievement of long term goals may turn around and obstruct it instead in other situations.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

So, I think I have arrived to the final conclusion about universal terminal goal. It came from definitions of each word in the phrase, and take their implications into account. Goal is the noun, while terminal and universal are the adjectives that describe the noun.

The word Goal means preferred state or condition in the future. If it's not preferred, it can't be a goal. If it's already happened in the past, it can't be a goal either. Although it's possible that the goal is to make future condition similar to preferred condition in the past as reference. The preference requires the existence of at least one conscious entity. Preference can't exist in a universe without consciousness, so can't a goal.

The word Terminal requires that the goal is seen from the perspective of conscious entities that exist in the furthest conceivable future. If the future point of reference is too close to the present, it would expire soon and the goal won't be usable anymore.

The word Universal requires that no other constraint should be added to the goal determined by aforementioned words. The only valid constraints have already been set by the words goal and terminal.

I think the deductive reasoning above doesn't leave much wiggle room for alternative interpretation on the universal terminal goal. But we can get the same result from another route, starting from our current position, so we can feel more connected. I call this route universality tests.
First, select the most important thing/preferred condition that you want to achieve, which you will defend at all cost.
If you become more capable than you are now (eg. stronger, healthier, wealthier, more influential, more literate, smarter, wiser, etc.), will you stick to your current terminal goal?
If you can do whatever you want to do, and you can be whatever you want to be, will you stick to your current terminal goal?
You will find the universal terminal goal when your answer to the test is yes.