The Deep North

Consciousness at its heart is relatively simple. It is an awareness of oneself within the world. The thing that makes it necessary to have a sense of 'self' in particular is our ability is to work things out in simulation using our imagination. We can imagine that we are dreaming and in that dream we are, in turn, dreaming about ourselves. When dreaming, the simulation of oneself can be so compelling that we actually believe that the dreamworld is real and that our dream self is our real self. However, at a deep level, we 'know' that there is a real 'self' at the top of any imaginary hierarchy and that is us -- the real one. No matter how perfect the simulation, there is always a real separate central consciousness to which we can return. In the text above, a conscious individual reading it is modeling (imagining) some person imagining that they are dreaming a dream about themselves within another dream. At no point does ones 'real' conscious self ...

Straight vanilla install of FreeDOS on VirtualBox predictably fails right out of the  ... box.  As soon as it starts it goes into an endless loop: invalid opcode at 0fae  invalid opcode at 0fae  invalid opcode at 0fae ... etc Bizarrely, adding the parameter 'raw' to whatever call is being made to memdisk is at least a fix for what I was using.  Press when you get to the main screen and then  Change from this: [...]/memdisk To this: [...]/memdisk   raw I'm not sure what governs the thing that replaces [...] above. It was different on mine than the documentation where I found this suggested as a fix. 

2020-02-28 -- Update: China continues to maintain control of the outbreak. No new deaths were reported in China today and only eight new cases. Unfortunately, at least some countries appear unable to cope with the outbreak. If the numbers increase as they have for the top six growing fastest, cases could number in the millions by the end of March. The World Health Organization have increased the risk assessment of the coronavirus to 'very high' globally. 2020-02-24 -- Update: Data is still a bit murky, so it is hard to rely on the accuracy of predicted numbers. It is not possible to assign reliable error bars. However, the fact that the spread is slowing is clearly there in the data and it is unlikely in the extreme that misreporting would look like that. Here is a graph from the World Health Organization.  It is pretty obvious that the big spike there is out of whack. That is an artifact from one example of Chinese misreporting. Despite the clear problem there, the shap...