The New World of Lonnie Mandigo

I recommend the book ... Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment  by Francis Fukuyama In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...

 I just finished the Great Courses/Wondrium course Strategic Thinking Skills .  You can find it here... https://www.wondrium.com/strategic-thinking-skills This covers a huge number of areas that I've been a student of most of my life.  The benefit for me was how it tied so many things together. I would have loved to have this overview available to me when I was in my 20s.

 I'm a little slow in making this post.  I've been through an interesting experience over the last several weeks, which culminated (so far) with brain surgery the weekend before last.

 In The Origin Question , I brought up randomness and its role in the structure of different models of the universe. This post is a non-authoritative ponder on the nature of randomness.

In my metaphysics, I've posited two broad classes of components; physical and informational.  I assert that they are here (which may be hasty), but where did they come from?

The pursuit of individual components is fraught with peril in physics.  It's an endless turtles-all-the-way-down problem with no real termination.  I must be able to decompose any component into constituent components and, of course, each of those components must be decomposable as well.  This is an interesting pastime but not always helpful.