#FreeSchool ⬅️ (see hashtag) @freeschool@qoto.org

"Goofle's Ad Platform" - a new way to say the BigTech giant's name and word replacement... coming from Goof or mistake :)

- @greybeard@vivaldi.net

"No I don't use goofle..."

@Tutanota Appreciate you guys and anyone on Fediverse trying to do good answering questions (and also being in the line of fire quite naturally from trying to do good).

Even if it took months to reply a question (I like El joa didn't forget!) and think that's something good in itself

For another example, Mastodon expects you to sign up to 3rd party site before a simple message being humanly read, which I can see working for code etc but for the 10% of comments I think we could all try accepting messages here on Fediverse and even help support Fediverse and such things like Tutanota... y

Yes even if it's "greenwashing" as other company's might be doing, still I (or you) do expect a lot (or everything) to suddenly be green or for windmills to power all this 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 which is highly unlikely (not likely to be supported ever by mass capitalism) so not making fun of all us users for trying here but maybe just me (because I'm guilty of putting people to the wall and grilling them...!)

So this post is basically to say "thanks" and not stray either from the naive stand points (I like the other users grilling here) but Tuta you tick MANY MANY BOXES AND REPLYING HERE on Fediverse is a big ➕ 🆗 ☑️ ! )

☑️ Thank you (also my good deed for the day is done as I write a lot of grilling stuff!)

P.S
And to other people here (that are hell-bent on getting things perfect) we can also message each other or follow... and see what we're doing about it...

@MangoMonster
@el_joa@mastodon.social
@El_joa@todon.nl
@charles8192
@materhyu
@iooioio
@patschuli
@Stadtkind

I think could do well to follow you too and will add notifications 🔔 just for a few days to see what "we" the justified are doing ourselves!! 💗 ⚔️ 🚀 me too!

#Healthier #Loopbacks from computers / portables back to #Reality seems to be what we need from using Computer Technology... In a #Sterile #Reality we seem to need this else fall into a game loop where not much changes... just one player mode.

So rather than #Consumption / Output of #Emotions from wanting it all online from 1 person, something collaborative for personal growth. Projects without personal growth are almost 0 growth at the end.

Or instead of Projections of whatever it is we want, from behind a screen from others, reaching something creative / visible at the end!

Sterile Reality ===>to Virtual Reality ===> to Reality Re-Cultured / Getting shit done for ourselves / sorting our life out which can't be done in 1 player mode!

🙍 to 👩‍🏫 👨‍🏫 🏫 ?
#Teachers / Active #Students / regular "#School" / #FreeSchool #Homework ?

🙍 to 🖌️ 🎨 ✏️ ?
#Art / #Creativity / #Collaboration #Real #P2P ?

(but there is a big chance we'd find another way to escape what locals and generally people don't se the same or is a big task to understand about almost anything... even if not peace / accepting individuality / talking about it / being less authoritarian which it probably all overlaps no matter where you come from)

If we didn't have Internet we *_*might*_* be doing more locally

"Computer User" does seem to sound worse in this context, even though it's all really good, fun, educational etc... it's still like one thing we use A LOT

#Computer #User from #Sterile #Reality so needs #Healthier #Loopbacks to #Reality... rather than #Consumption / Output of #Emotions from wanting it all online and Projections of it onto everyone here behind a screen !

@em @freemo Hi both... See also https://qoto.org/@freeschool/112356302234978373 for more comments / perspective.

https://privnote.com/info/about

About Privnote

TLDR ( private + passworded + automatic self-destruct + timed messages 💥 💣 )

Have you ever wanted to send confidential information within your work environment, to family or friends, but were afraid to do so over the internet, because some malicious hacker could be spying on you?

Privnote is a free web based service that allows you to send top secret notes over the internet. It's fast, easy, and requires no password or user registration at all.

Just write your note, and you'll get a link. Then you copy and paste that link into an email (or instant message) that you send to the person who you want to read the note. When that person clicks the link for the first time, they will see the note in their browser and the note will automatically self-destruct; which means no one (even that very same person) can read the note again. The link won't work any more.

#Privacy #Online
#Private #Secure #Communication
#InfoSec #Security #Tech #P2P #Internet #Notes

Best 2024 Secure Email Providers ?

+ 2 main requirements worth mentioning:

1- zero-knowledge by provider (they or others can't snoop)

2- open registration (can create account)

█ Tuta (German company)
@Tutanota (known as Tutanota before)

█ Proton (Swiss company)
@protonmail

█ Posteo (paid) but I heard / read before is quite good

Excerpt:
"Proton and Tuta are the two most popular encrypted email providers, and with good cause. They check all the boxes and users really can’t go wrong with either. Originally I was hoping to list three or four more options, but out of all the other popular choices in the privacy community, I couldn't find any that were zero-knowledge by default (and had open registration). That's unfortunate because privacy and security aren’t always black and white. I hate giving users only two choices of provider. Unfortunately, at this time, Proton and Tuta are the most user-friendly, reputable, and trustworthy services I can recommend to mainstream readers. That's not to say that there aren't other services that are trustworthy, but they may require additional setup or come with caveats that make me uncomfortable to recommend them to my target audience."

#Email #Privacy #Online #Proton #Tuta #Tutanota #Posteo
#Private #Secure #Communication
#InfoSec #Security #Tech #P2P #Internet #Notes

Excerpt from:
https://blog.thenewoil.org/the-best-secure-email-provider-in-2024

FediTips new username on Fediverse it doesn't show up!

#Question #Fediverse #Tips !

(at least on Mastodon doesn't show account on search or auto-complete)

New account is said to be:

https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips

which should be mesasgable
(and said also on website to be...)

@FediTips@social.growyourown.services

Old one does show up which is:

https://mstdn.social/@feditips
@feditips

Website works but writing to not (unless I get reply from this)...

Website has other links and maintained by:

https://social.chinwag.org/@FediThing / @FediThing

@Hoss @Matty @SIC_Guy @William_The_Dragonborn @graf @coolboymew @nikiboo
Great #art #anim #fan #fanart #game #theme #character #meme !
Now... who is going to list all the characters and in order of appearance ?
#FreeSchool

#Fediverse feels this as messaging...

Like after sending messages suddenly no reply and usually a good point stuns them indefinitely... I admit it's hard losing but together we can "lose better"... but you must bow to me (and I to you in practise)

#Chess as in #Life sometimes
#Winning together #games
#Losing together #games

Hate has no winners (but those bankers 🏦 paying for and making money from #war). 💰

Often banks give money to both sides of warring parties.

Loans given and debt with it... for one side or another to bomb each other. To buy more equipment and explosives to use on each other, instead of work on something better... 💰 🤑 💰 🤑 💰 🤑

#Banks and #Bombs as source of war 💣 🚀 ✈️ 🔫 ⛵ 🚢 🏦 💣

#Money as way of collecting for war

@goo Tagging this post with #Animal #Consciousness #Sentientism #Insect #Welfare #Humanism

Source: https://nautil.us/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-571584/

Optional text version below:

Zoology

Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness

A new consensus emerges.

By Dan Falk May 3, 2024

Article Lead Image

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun.

The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited last month, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before. For decades, there’s been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to us—the great apes, for example—have conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.

We have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.

The new declaration, signed by biologists and philosophers, formally embraces that view. It reads, in part: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).” Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document represents a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness.

The four-paragraph New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was unveiled on April 19, at a one-day conference called “The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” held at New York University. Spearheaded by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Kristin Andrews of York University in Ontario, the philosopher and environmental scientist Jeff Sebo of New York University, and the philosopher Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the declaration has so far been signed by more than 100 researchers, including the psychologists Nicola Clayton and Irene Pepperberg, the neuroscientists Anil Seth and Christof Koch, the zoologist Lars Chittka, and the philosophers David Chalmers and Peter Godfrey-Smith.

The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature—an idea enunciated by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential 1974 essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” Even if a creature is very different from us, Nagel wrote, “fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. … We may call this the subjective character of experience.” If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain or pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.

“I hope the declaration [draws] greater attention to the issues of nonhuman consciousness, and to the ethical challenges that accompany the possibility of conscious experiences far beyond the human,” wrote Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, in an email. “I hope it sparks discussion, informs policy and practice in animal welfare, and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation that we have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.”

A Growing Awareness

The declaration began to take shape last fall, following conversations between Sebo, Andrews, and Birch. “The three of us were talking about how much has happened over the past 10 years, the past 15 years, in the science of animal consciousness,” Sebo recalled. We now know, for example, that octopuses feel pain and cuttlefish remember details of specific past events. Studies in fish have found that cleaner wrasse appear to pass a version of the “mirror test,” which indicates a degree of self-recognition, and that zebra fish show signs of curiosity. In the insect world, bees show apparent play behavior, while Drosophila fruit flies have distinct sleep patterns influenced by their social environment. Meanwhile, crayfish display anxiety-like states—and those states can be altered by anti-anxiety drugs.
In Body Image
INQUIRING MINDS: After reflecting on recent research into diverse animal minds, Jeff Sebo, Kristin Andrews, and Jonathan Birch (from left) decided to organize scientists and philosophers to sign a declaration that extends consciousness to more animals. Credit: From left: Kate Reeder; Ben Wulf; Maria Moore/LSE.

These and other signs of conscious states in animals that had long been considered less than conscious excited and challenged biologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers of mind. “A lot of people have now accepted for a while that, for example, mammals and birds are either conscious or very likely to be conscious, but less attention has been paid to other vertebrate and especially invertebrate taxa,” Sebo said. In conversations and at meetings, experts largely agreed that these animals must have consciousness. However, this newly formed consensus wasn’t being communicated to the wider public, including other scientists and policymakers. So the three researchers decided to draft a clear, concise statement and circulate it among their colleagues for endorsement. The declaration is not meant to be comprehensive but rather “to point to where we think the field is now and where the field is headed,” Sebo said.

The new declaration updates the most recent effort to establish scientific consensus on animal consciousness. In 2012, researchers published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf), which said that an array of nonhuman animals, including but not limited to mammals and birds, have “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors” and that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”

The new declaration expands the scope of its predecessor and is also worded more carefully, Seth wrote. “It doesn’t try to do science by diktat, but rather emphasizes what we should take seriously regarding animal consciousness and the relevant ethics given the evidence and theories that we have.” He wrote that he is “not in favor of avalanches of open letters and the like,” but that he ultimately “came to the conclusion that this declaration was very much worth supporting.”

It’s not enough for people to prevent animals in captivity from experiencing bodily pain and discomfort.

Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science at the University of Sydney who has worked extensively with octopuses, believes that the complex behaviors those creatures exhibit—including problem-solving, tool use, and play behavior—can only be interpreted as indicators of consciousness. “They’ve got this attentive engagement with things, with us and with novel objects that makes it very hard not to think that there’s quite a lot going on inside them,” he said. He noted that recent papers looking at pain and dreamlike states in octopuses and cuttlefish “point in the same direction … toward experience as being a real part of their lives.”

While many of the animals mentioned in the declaration have brains and nervous systems that are very different from those of humans, the researchers say that this needn’t be a barrier to consciousness. For example, a bee’s brain contains only about a million neurons, compared to some 86 billion in the case of humans. But each of those bee neurons may be as structurally complex as an oak tree. The network of connections they form is also incredibly dense, with each neuron contacting perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 others. The nervous system of an octopus, by contrast, is complex in other ways. Its organization is highly distributed rather than centralized; a severed arm can exhibit many of the behaviors of the intact animal.
In Body Image
ANIMAL AWARENESS: Recent research on animal minds—including those of crayfish, octopuses, snakes, and fish—suggests that consciousness “can exist in a [neural] architecture that looks completely alien” to ours, Peter Godfrey-Smith said. Credit: Clockwise from top left: Svetlana123/iStock; Colin Marshal/Biosphoto/Science Source; MATTHIASRABBIONE/iStock; Jim Maley/iStock.

The upshot, Andrews said, is that “we might not need nearly as much equipment as we thought we did” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex—the outer layer of the mammalian brain, which is believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory, and other key aspects of consciousness—may not be necessary for the simpler phenomenal consciousness targeted in the declaration.

“There was a big debate about whether fish are conscious, and a lot of that had to do with them lacking the brain structures that we see in mammals,” she said. “But when you look at birds and reptiles and amphibians, they have very different brain structures and different evolutionary pressures—and yet some of those brain structures, we’re finding, are doing the same kind of work that a cerebral cortex does in humans.”

Godfrey-Smith agreed, noting that behaviors indicative of consciousness “can exist in an architecture that looks completely alien to vertebrate or human architecture.”

Mindful Relations

While the declaration has implications for the treatment of animals, and especially for the prevention of animal suffering, Sebo noted that the focus should go beyond pain. It’s not enough for people to prevent animals in captivity from experiencing bodily pain and discomfort, he said. “We also have to provide them with the kinds of enrichment and opportunities that allow them to express their instincts and explore their environments and engage in social systems and otherwise be the kinds of complex agents they are.”

But the consequences of bestowing the label of “conscious” onto a wider array of animals—particularly animals whose interests we are not used to considering—are not straightforward. For example, our relationship with insects may be “inevitably a somewhat antagonistic one,” Godfrey-Smith said. Some pests eat crops, and mosquitoes can carry diseases. “The idea that we could just sort of make peace with the mosquitoes—it’s a very different thought than the idea that we could make peace with fish and octopuses,” he said.

Similarly, little attention is given to the well-being of insects such as Drosophila, which are widely used in biology research. “We think about the welfare of livestock and of mice in research, but we never think about the welfare of the insects,” said Matilda Gibbons, who researches the neural basis of consciousness at the University of Pennsylvania and has signed the declaration.

While scientific bodies have created some standards for the treatment of lab mice, it’s not clear if today’s declaration will lead to new standards for the treatment of insects. But new scientific findings do sometimes spark new policies. Britain, for example, enacted legislation to increase protection for octopuses, crabs, and lobsters after a London School of Economics report indicated that those animals can experience pain, distress, or harm.

While the declaration makes no mention of artificial intelligence, the issue of possible AI consciousness has been on the minds of animal-consciousness researchers. “Current AI systems are very unlikely to be conscious,” Sebo said. However, what he’s learned about animal minds “does give me pause and makes me want to approach the topic with caution and humility.”

Andrews hopes that the declaration will spark more research into animals that have often been overlooked, a move that has the potential to further expand our awareness of the scope of consciousness in the animal world. “All these nematode worms and fruit flies that are in almost every university—study consciousness in them,” she said. “You already have them. Somebody in your lab is going to need a project. Make that project a consciousness project. Imagine that!”

This article was originally published on the Quanta Abstractions blog.

Lead image: What’s going on in the mind of a bee? There’s “a realistic possibility” of consciousness, according to a new declaration. Credit: Tran The Ngoc/Shutterstock.

Dan Falk

Posted on May 3, 2024

Dan Falk (@danfalk) is a science journalist and broadcaster based in Toronto. His books include The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time.