Thanks for the details!

Biofilm is exactly where I tend to find them Yeah, I got that from the video description :D

This video doesn’t have stentors, but it is of my thickest biofilm, a lot of stentors were found in the same sample: https://youtu.be/T3Bbg-ObTok

That video looks really nice! At first I thought it might be phase contrast, but I see from the description that you got creative. Nice job

Ooh, interesting to learn! I think it is because I only collected a few samples from the wild when I first got my microscope and still had no idea of how prepare the samples or what I was looking it, so if there was a stentor in there I probably did not notice…

I have practiced since then with fresh samples of things that I find around my apartment and things that I culture - and the occasional lichen. Tomorrow I will go find some samples from outside - I will get some biofilm from a pond too and look for stentor.

Very nice photos!

At first I thought I was looking at some kind of radiator and that a very tiny pigeon was standing on the valve.

Did you hand it over two stone tablets?

Yes, it is possible!

The objective I used to take the photo is the ‘40x’ objective. If looking through a 10x eyepiece (which is common) the total magnification when looking through the eyepiece is 400x.

If you look through a 4x objective and a 10x eyepiece then the magnification is 40x. The blood cells are visible at this magnification but they look quite small. I am specifying in case the ‘40x’ was understood as 40x total magnification.

Succeeding you mean

I am privacy conscious and care about privacy even though I don’t care too much about my own personal privacy just for privacy’s sake.

Privacy advocacy runs deeper than just protecting your own data. Convincing someone to care about “their privacy” is more straightforward when they face a real threat. For example, a journalist in Mexico writing about a politician linked to organized crime has every reason to avoid being easily tracked. That person is not going to post their location on Facebook.

But most people aren’t under direct threat. If you read my texts, you’ll find casual conversations with family and dinner plans. I’m not afraid of someone showing up at my door, so I’m fine sharing my address to get a package delivered. Getting ads is a minor annoyance.

Still, I care about privacy. Not necessarily mine, but privacy as a principle. I care about what surveillance capitalism does to society. Even if my personal threat model is easy, I want tools and systems to exist for people with harder ones. Privacy is part of the kind of world I think we should live in, and its erosion usually points to larger structural problems.

So back to the question. It’s easier to convince someone to care about privacy if they feel directly threatened. But if they don’t, you need something else to make them give up convenience in the name of privacy. That something is ideology. You’re asking how to shift someone’s ideological framework. That’s hard, and not something you can do for them. You can recommend good material, share your reasoning, explain what led you to care. But they have to engage with the ideas themselves. Like with exercise, you can’t build someone’s muscles for them. You can’t implant the ideology, but you can create the conditions for it to take root.

Very cool! I have yet to encounter my first Stentor!

Interesting. Thanks!

I wonder if UV illumination of the lichen would work to preferentially eliminate tiny animals. I think the algae is rather resistant when it is in the lichenized body.

Currently I am breaking up lichen into small pieces and placing the pieces into jars with sterilized water that contains some nutrients (ammonium sulfate, (di)ammonium phosphate, potassium sulfate). I place the jars through my apartment under different light conditions.

The idea is to preferentially grow algae by having low phosphate and exposing to the sun, dilute, grow again, dilute, and repeat a few times to purify. Similar to how I purify a wild mushroom through agar transfers. In the past I did succeed growing a bunch of Trebouxia but I left those jars standing for two years and now they have a wild mixture, so I am starting the process again.

Wow, this is amazing!!

Blackshirts and Reds was a good entry point for me since I don’t have much historical background. It helped clarify terms like “fascism” that I’d seen used a lot but never truly understood. It also laid out some contrasts between fascist and communist dictatorships, which I found helpful early on.

One thing that really caught my attention was the bit on Kerala and the so-called “Kerala model.” That led me to Prabhat Patnaik’s article “The International Context and the Kerala Model” (available on scihub), which explained how IMF-backed liberalization can destabilize local economies by -for example - replacing self-sufficient agriculture with luxury imports.This was quite insighttful.

That said, the book does blur things together to build its narrative, and it doesn’t source every claim. I feel like this sometimes leads to misleading simplifications. For example, it says:

In Latvia, the communist activist Alfreds Rubies, who protested the inequities of free-market “reform,” has been kept in prison for years without benefit of trial

Reading that, you’d think Rubics was just an activist jailed for protesting neoliberalism. But when I looked him up, he was a politician that tried to crush opposition and backed a failed coup. That context matters, and the omission feels like nuance is missing. I found a few other cases like that - claims that technically check out but lack important context. Still, I learned a lot, and it made me want more source-heavy stuff. Something more like a history textbook that compares narratives directly and points at more direct sources (like UN resolutions, court documents, this type of things I like going through).

Another thing that I can add is that I am reading other things in addition to your recommendations. One memorable book that I am enjoying is ‘Envisioning Real Utopias’ by Erik Olin Wright. From what I have found online there is a mixed reaction to Olin’s ideas from socialists/communists. My understanding of his claims so far is that there are mechanisms of social transformation that may be accessed by exploiting vulnerabilities during the social reproduction process. I still need to read through a lot of the book but so far he has suggested that worker cooperatives (like Mondragon Corporation) and the creation of ‘cooperative banks’ (willing to lend money for transforming companies into worker-owned) create one of the viable mechanisms through which the capitalist system may be eroded. I have found some of the criticism of trying to solve capitalism with more capitalism, which is an easy criticism to make, but I do think Olin makes some good points. As of this evening I would say Olin’s description of the problem of social transformation, how he categorizes strategies in terms of desirability, viability, and achievability, and his data-driven approach to assessing policy strategies (such as looking at what has actually happened in universal basic income experiments), is what I am most in alignment with. But still lots to learn.

Ah, now that I think about it I did add some nutrients to support algal growth, so these could be crystals.

Already finished Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds a few days ago and and watched Parenti’s speech. I am still going through the list, little by little. Great stuff, thanks !

perversions like ground roller pigeons

Oh… wow. I looked them up and I am both amazed and saddened.

I think that its emergence is weak but I see no resolution to the hard problem of consciousness any time soon, so for the time my opinions about it are ideas that I find compelling and intuitive and not grounded in facts and evidence. Weak emergence does posit some form of pansychism in the sense that sentient-like behavior can emerge in other brains and even that characteristics that we might associate with sentience might emerge from other phenomena present through the universe. But, because of the same reasons that the hard problem is hard, it is also hard to study and learn about these phenomena.

I can try to explain a little better what I meant.

I don’t believe we have “free will” in the sense that the mind is separate from the body (dualism) and that it is able to break the laws of physics by altering our physiological processes. I don’t think that the non-determinism of quantum mechanics in itself gives us agency, and our mind does not have a mechanism to select how a particular wavev function collapses (not a fan of the Orch OR model).

So, in this traditional sense my answer is “no, we do not have free will”

But I think that the existential crisis and feeling of a lack of agency stems from the model of sentience that one believes. If one rejects dualism, posits that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but then ascribes only very loosely a mechanism to consciousness such as ‘complex information processing gives rise to consciousness’, then sentience appears to be just some unexplained quirk that is not essential and just happens to be there. Combining a lack of dualism and free will with consciousness being a useless quirk is what (I think) creates the existential crisis associated with a lack of free will. I used to fall into this camp of thought and resolved the crisis through a logic such as: “Yeah, there is no free will, living is nice though so I am happy that I can accidentally experience the world”.

What pushed me to re-assess this way of thinking originally was reading through a paper about teaching a dish of neurons how to play pong](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6). At first it did not make sense to me how one can possibly provide feedback to a group of isolated neurons such that it could learn to play a game. What ‘reward’ can you give a group of neurons to push them to do what you want?!

I looked into Karl Friston, the last author of that paper, which led me down a path of study. I discovered Judea Pearl, who formalized causal reasoning in a way that lets us build statistical models to move from correlations to counterfactual causes. This makes it possible to teach causal inference even to machines.

Karl Friston’s work and other researchers in the field argue that the brain is a computer built for causal computing. This idea underpins the Bayesian brain, Predictive Coding Theory, Active Inference.

In Karl Friston’s Active Inference book, sentience is proposed to emerge as a result of the prediction engine. What we experience is not actually what our senses already experienced, but instead it is what our brain expects that we will sense in the next instant. This model of reality that is built by our brain in its attempt to perform its basic function (link causes to effects in order to predict the next stimulus).

One idea is that consciousness emerges because the predictive brain is creating a ‘model’ that does not exist in physical space and so it needs imagination to explore it. The imagination of things that do not exist is essential to the process of generating counterfactuals, and counterfactuals are at the core of the causality machine. To show that A causes B, you need to imagine a situation in which A is not present and estimate the likelyhood of B. One idea is that it is precisely in the creation of a world without A that sentience emerges.

A lot of these ideas are not falsifiable, so it is difficult to say that this is indeed the mechanism of consciousness. But some of the ideas are falsifiable, and those ideas have helped these researchers teach neurons how to play pong, so I think they might have a point.

So, then, I find it plausible that consciousness is not a quirk but an essential feature of our brain. To me this resolves the free will crisis because my consciousness is not an accidental outcome of physical processes just chaotically whizzing by but an actual feature of the machinery that is me.

So these outputs are experienced. And that experience of making predictions is me. Am I the one experiencing the predictions as well?

So this sentence confuses me: “This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.” Am I making the predictions or is it the CPM?

I am this machine and I follow the laws of physics. I am part of physical reality, and my sentience is a feature of who I am. If I do something it is because I chose to do so, and the fact that I chose to do so in accordance to the law of physics does not remove my agency.

Thoughts and muscle movements come about through the opening and closing of ion channels that allow information to travel through neurons and for muscle fibers to contract and relax. ‘Free will’ in the sense that our mind is separate from our body and that it can somehow open those ion channels is a combination of dualism and molecular telekinesis, so I do not believe that, no.

But I do believe that consciousness is an essential emergent property of our brain. What we experience might be the output of a causal prediction engine in our brain that is making a prediction about the immediate sensory experience in a way that we can respond to stimuli before they happen. In that sense, yes, I do believe in free will because that conscious output that I experience is me! This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.

I think that a materialist framing of free will requires accepting some model of consciousness in which consciousness is not just a weird accident but is a physical phenomenon that is part of us. An essential feature of how our brain works. This is not yet demonstrated (very difficult if not impossible to do so), but I think it is. Then ‘free will’ and ‘a material system following the laws of physics’ is no longer a contradiction.

Interesting. I have some idea about how pigeons originally came to live in cities, but I don’t know much about the state of dove breeding today.

I do see a lot of interesting doves near where I live, so I will pay more attention from now on to whether they have rings. Maybe I live close to a pigeon breeder. I have not seen the one in the picture again, so I hope it found its way back home.

As I approached to take the pictures it walked away first and then flew to a nearby spot. I didn’t want to bother it anymore so I did not follow.

I didn’t fully understand why it had a ring on its foot, as keeping track of all pigeons in the city seems ambitious. Does this mean that the bird likely comes from a breeder? You mentioned a ‘dovecote’ and I figured this meant its wild resting spot, but is this also the term for the place that breeders keep them in?