FooBarrington

God, the sweat glands one sounds horrible.

"You cook & eat me? Then I'll cook you!"

Why should a Chinese person reduce their emissions, while each American emits so much more?

And now that I know you can’t read…

Buddy, if you spend a couple seconds thinking about my question, you might notice that "We all do need to cut our emissions" is not an answer. I'll try to put it in more explicit terms, try not knee-jerk-reacting this time:

Why should a person in China stop increasing their emissions to make profits, while so many people in America make so much profit/save money by emitting so much more on average?

You're acting like this question obviously has a definitive answer, but it doesn't!

Look, it's totally fine to criticize China's rising emissions on their own. But it's really, really dumb to contrast their total with total US emissions - especially when you don't mention anything about how many emissions are caused to supply the west with stuff. It's great that US emissions are going down, but they're still way too high because they provide cover for other nations to save money by using fossil fuels just a bit longer. Why are other countries morally wrong in climbing towards the level of America, as long as they stay below?

I'm arguing against the assertion that "China is doing the most damage to the climate". It's obvious that the country with more citizens will cause more emissions, and it's also completely useless! Or would you suddenly change your mind if China split into 5 countries, all less populous than the US?

Why should a Chinese person reduce their emissions, while each American emits so much more? You insist that arbitrary geographic divisions are somehow relevant, but they aren't.

And because total emissions matter, we all have a bigger responsibility to reduce our per-capita output if we're above others. The atmosphere and climate don't care about countries, so each American still has a much higher responsibility to change their society than each Chinese does.

It's not really possible to give a concrete answer without a concrete definition of "understanding". But unless you assume supernatural explanations, either systems must be able to "understand", or humans are also incapable of "understanding", since we ourselves are physical systems too.

For instance I feel that a gravity coin sorter is made with understanding but does not have understanding

I get the example and agree that such a coin sorter does not meaningfully have an understanding of gravity. But IMO it does have a (minimal) understanding of the different coins you're sorting, since it contains a mechanism for differentiating between their sizes.

Imagine we replaced the gravity mechanism with a bunch of actuators controlled by organic neurons, which are connected to something like an eye. The neurons fire and cause the actuators to sort the coins. Now, if say the neurons just react to brightness levels it'd be hard to argue there's an understanding. But if the neurons are part of a real human brain, they can definitely understand the coins etc. and sort based on their understanding.

As you take away more parts of said brain, when does it lose the understanding?

No, and if you want to discuss the philosophical idea, please don't waste my time with dumb questions.

Yes, I think it proves that understanding does not require consciousness.

No, you're still a necessary part of the system, since otherwise there is no interaction possible. And yes, I don't think understanding relies on consciousness.

Where is the semantic difference?

I'd like to add a rebuttal I tend to agree with: You're only a component of a larger system, and the whole system (you + the room + your list of instructions) does encode some understanding, otherwise a chinese speaker wouldn't be able to interact with the room in any meaningful way.

In almost any system, you can look at a specific part and argue that part doesn't fulfill a property that the entire system taken as one does.

Wouldn't it be more sanitary to clean them beforehand?

Fair, though I'd like to mention that you don't need a pot to boil something. It's enough to use sticks to move/roll hot stones into a natural bowl-shaped indentation. Sounds complex, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened at least a couple times before pots.

Yeah, throughout human existence I'd guess that no preparation method is more common than "throw it in a pot and boil it". Can't go wrong with that for almost any food - even if the texture isn't amazing, you can't really over-boil most stuff to where it's dangerous.