Word: cosmically
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Some laypeople (like me, for example) have trouble seeing the difference between these two views--between saying consciousness doesn't exist and saying it is nothing more than the brain. In any event, both versions of strict materialism put a damper on cosmic speculation. As strict materialism became more mainstream, many philosophers talked as if the mind-body problem was no great problem. Consciousness became almost passe...
...would reassemble under gravity only to smash again. Eventually, a few grew large enough to resist breaking up, and they swallowed up the smaller pieces and became the planets. The asteroids are believed to be the few pieces that escaped being swallowed--some of them presumably the debris from cosmic smashups and the rest pieces of rock that never were part of planetesimals in the first place...
...With sheer brute force: calculation and evaluation at cosmic speeds. At the height of the game, Deep Blue was seeing about 200 million positions every second. You and I can see one; Kasparov, two. Maybe three. But 200 million? It was style vs. power, and power won. It was like watching Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging, try to box a steamroller in a very small ring. The results aren't pretty...
Speculation titillates the mind but usually ends by subtly demeaning the human place in the cosmic scheme. The Earth that the ancients took to be the center of the drama becomes ever more marginal, a receding speck. Astronomers' searches tend to assume that the aliens would be superior to earthlings, perhaps evolved beyond Earth's ability to comprehend them...
...million megabytes of data per day--an overwhelming volume far beyond human capacity to comprehend and evaluate. For that reason, the incoming radio waves are digitized and read into a custom-made, homegrown supercomputer, designed and assembled by Horowitz and his students, that sorts through the input and discards cosmic radio "noise...