We're gonna have to employ one guy to keep his hand on the electric power cord at all times and pull at the slightest hint of an AI coup d'etat. That's an important job which will pay well.

Yeah, for example, it's been well known for years that one of the mechanisms used by evolving cancer cells is to express surface HLA-G, which suppresses or down-regulates the host immune response, giving cancer cells more of the time needed for their nefarious purposes.

(the same HLA-G class is also expressed on embryo cells, helping to suppress the mother's immune response so her body doesn't attack the gestating fetus as a foreign body.)

I think that it's correct to use a "backward-looking" point of view: after all, we have to draw conclusions about the future on what has already happened.

However, not in the conditional sense of "what could have happened", or "could I have made any other choice?". To me, not only is that inherently unknownable, but it just confuses what is a very simple matter, that things happen for previous reasons (causes), and nothing happens without either a known reason (not free will) or unknown randomness (which is not free will either).

So, take any decision process that is claimed to be a "free will" process, and just work backwards. Ask why that decision was made. Either the acting party knows or doesn't. i they know, voila, there we have out determinant reason (cause). A different reason (cause) would have led to a different result.

On the other hand, the acting party might have no idea why the decision was made, so that can hardly be called free will. It just happened as if the decision had fallen out of the sky (randomness).

I really think it's that simple an issue. For any decision process there will be a series of "why" questions to determine how one chose this or that decision. Determinism or randomness (where randomness simply means we don't yet know the deterministic cause due to lack of knowledge).

Total layman jumping in here, but in the past I've wondered why the expanding space factor doesn't need to be included in calculating local mass-mass interactions. Even though the expansion is something exceedingly small (like 60 km/3 million light years every second or so?), it seemed that it should be included for precision in calculating how masses will move with respect to each other.

The typical answer (summarized) is that "local mass interaction totally overcomes spatial expansion, so only the gravitional effect exists in local systems", but it still seems that there would still have to be some accounting that some of the gravitional "pull" is having to be "used up" to counteract the expansion.

Your explanation above appears to make this even more necessary, since if we think of the expansion as negative curvature (which is in fact really the case), then even local space is, however minutely, curved in a negative way due to expansion. Therefore, any positive curvature of space is being exerted on that already negatively curved background, and hence the positive curvature of space would necessarily have to be minus whatever that negative curvature was (however miniscule).

Unless I should have been interpreting the typical answer to mean "local mass-mass interactions are of course affected by the expansion of space, but the local mass interaction is simply so large with respect to local spatial expansion, that the local effect of spatial expansion, while not zero, can be ignored for calculations". Or something to that effect.

I see. Well explained, thanks.

Thank you,

"... majority of mass in the galaxy does not orbit the central black hole but orbits the mass interior to it"

a little confused because, isn't orbiting the mass interior to the black hole the same as orbiting the black hole...?

Ah, your second point clears something up for me. I think I had read some time ago that some galaxies are found to actually lack dark matter, and by coincidence or not, also don't have black hole centers (were just start clusters?). But if galaxies exist without black holes and yet still have the velocity anomalies, then that's pretty definitive indeed.

I wonder, has it been completely ruled out that the extra mass necessary could be inside the black hole center? That is to say, that there could be a lot more mass in black holes than we have thought, and the stars closer to the center haven't yet fallen in because of [... some possible reason...]? Well certainly the intelligent people working on the problem have ruled this out, but I wonder how.

In my opinion on this article, one reason the subhead "It’s Funny, None of These Theories Seem Adequate " was necessary is because the article is clearly mixing up categories or levels of explanation. 1. and 3. are attempts to explain the "why" of humor from a logical or functional standpoint ("what are the criteria on which we decide something is funny?"), whereas 2. attempts to answer a totally different question, i.e. why do we laugh from a physiological standpoint (that is, what is the advantage or evolutionary benefit (because it gives us "relief"). In other words, for the purpose of this article, only 1. and 3. are relevant in the first place.