It is now time for the Swami to answer his questions!
Egbert asks… What is consciousness?
Consciousness is subjective experience. As Thomas Nagel put it in his famous paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” A thing is conscious if and only if it is like something to be that thing.
Ogremkv asks… Why does my 16 year-old male cat pick up toy mousies and wander around the house wailing at the top of his lungs? This seems to be a recently acquired habit.
The bad news: Your cat is grieving. He’s so damn old and slow that he’ll never catch another real mousie, and he’s realized this. The good news: you can order cognitively impaired mice who’ll be too stupid to understand the immanent and terrible fear they ought to feel from the mere presence of your cat, their natural predator. Which means they won’t run away, which means your cat will be able to catch them. I have located a website from which you can order mice with genetic material of your choice removed. Just pick a gene associated with intelligence, or knock-out the genes associated with sense of smell. It’s worked before.
Randy asks… Excluding cancer, to what extent does the DNA in our bodies mutate over a lifetime? How different is the most different DNA in any (non-cancerous) cells from the same person? If lifespan is extended, how far would this divergence go?
Genes are stubborn; they don’t like to change. I’ve done some digging, and found that there’s about .000001 mutations per gene per cell division (cited here and confirmed again here). That’s in somatic cells (found in your kidneys, for example), not germline cells like the sperm and the egg. This means that if we just looked at one gene, it would rack up about one mutation after a million cell divisions. If human lifespan is extended, then assuming we don’t have a way to slow down the mutation rate, it would probably skyrocket out of control (somatic mutations happen more frequently in older people than younger). I guess you’ll have to be satisfied with that ; )
KB147 asks… What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Both African and European.
24 miles per hour for both of them. You have to know these things when you’re king you know ; )
