[FRIAM] Can a robot have a soul?

[Stephen Guerin]

On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 9:42 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you mean by what you wrote, could consciousness, etc., be properties of
> the organism’s (or the robot’s) relation to other objects, my answer is
> emphatically  YES.  I hate to smear you before the rest of the group by
> agreeing with you, but you’ll just have to fight to get your reputation
> back.
>

<tugging up at fingers of white glove, removing and slapping Nick's cheek
to defend my complexity honor:>

I have in mind a more decentralized notion of the living system. Your
"organism" in your statement above appears more discrete and separate from
the "environment". Let's agree on decentralized living processes before
moving onto consciousness (which might later turn out to be more primary
than matter)


But the way,  as you know, I have always shared your fascination with
> Benard cells.  It seems to me that the atmosphere, at least at the regional
> scale,  has two ideal ways of being, depending on whether there are
> vertical entropic (?) differences between the surface and the tropopause: a
> quiescent regime, in which it settles out into quiescent, non-interacting
> layers, and a active regimen in which it is organized in columns of rising
> and falling air.  All actual atmospheres are combinations of these two
> regimes.  Critchlow’s Maxim applies not only to layers but to columns,
> since they the upward moving columns are composed of much different air
> from the downward moving ones.
>

After 15 years of discussing weather dynamics with you, we finally have an
applied need to model clouds. Please check out this video and associated
paper that was a top Siggraph paper. We are translating this to Netlogo and
AgentScript this month with students in the Supercomputing Challenge and
for use for matching camera observations of wildfire plume dynamics:


http://computationalsciences.org/publications/haedrich-2020-stormscapes.html
      T. Hädrich, M. Makowski, W. Pałubicki, D. T. Banuti, S. Pirk, and D.
L. Michels Stormscapes: Simulating Cloud Dynamics in the Now ACM
Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2020), Vol. 39, No. 6, Article 175.


>   sort themselves out into layers and reside easily with one another,  the
> layers slipping by like other as if grease.    Anytime you get *confection
> *in any layer, it’s top and its bottom become bumpy and create turbulence
> in the layers above and below.
>

Confection can be tricky with convective ovens.  ;-p

While convection ovens are very versatile and can handle both yeasted
doughs and deposited batters, these are not as beneficial for products
baked inside high-sided pans that do not allow for full contact between air
currents and the product’s external surfaces. Ideally, they would be used
for free-standing products baked on sheet pans or perforated racks. Hot air
is circulated by a fan at an airflow/velocity of 2–22 mph (1–10 m/s). This
rate must be carefully set depending on the product and baking conditions.
The convective heat transfer coefficient (h) developed during baking
depends on the air velocity and temperature inside the baking chamber. It
can range from 20–120 W/m2 K.4. Fast air currents can distort the shape of
delicate products such as sponge cakes, batters, and soft doughs such as
pastry. They can also dry out the products, negatively impacting their
texture, shelf-life, and overall quality. Rapid surface drying of dough
pieces may form a hard skin which can prevent dough piece expansion during
oven spring. On the other hand, too slow air currents can reduce the rate
of heat transfer and increase the baking time. This hinders convection.
from: https://bakerpedia.com/processes/convection-oven/
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