Recent content by Lren Zvsm

I disagree. I psychopath can be conscious without having a conscience. So can human babies and non-human animals, which lack the capacity to think very much about what they think, feel, and do, and therefore can't be moral agents.

One need not invoke religion or any supernatural belief in order to believe that the nature of subjective sensations (qualia) is currently unexplained. I have very little doubt that qualia have a physical basis, because physical events are known to cause them and change them in predictable...

Though we cannot "make" qualia in an artificial system, we cannot predict that qualia exist all and only from neurological data either. So, for the purposes of writing fiction, you could posit that any machine that could perform all of the tasks that the human brain can would, no matter how...

This is a question for people who know about astrophysics. It's been said that the habitable zones around red dwarf stars are so close to those stars that any planets in the zones would be tidally locked to the stars in question. With one side roasting and another side freezing almost...

If your story depends on future physics that makes things possible that are considered impossible in the real world, explaining the imaginary physics is the WORST thing you could do. If Einstein has to be wrong in order for your future physics to work, any explanation of that future...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

The goal of CPR is to keep the body in revivable condition until the paramedics arrive. CPR has revived people whose hearts had stopped--but the odds are against it.

My scenario is as follows: A moon with sufficient size and atmospheric pressure to allow for liquid water on the surface orbits a gas giant which in turn orbits a red dwarf star. The life on this moon is adapted to levels of radiation that would kill human beings. Part of the adaptation is...

I take this to mean that, though the gauntlets are useful against supernatural opponents, they have no supernatural properties. This makes sense, because supernatural creatures can be vulnerable to ordinary materials. There is nothing supernatural about wooden stakes, silver bullets...

Most of us have probably read Edwin Abbot's "Flatland," which was published in 1884. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/201/pg201.txt In this novella, sapient and motile polygons & circles inhabit a two-dimensional world. Late in the story, a sapient sphere presents itself to the...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/science-aliens-part-4-what-color-would-their-blood-be-180978261/

Good points, but we should also remember that we don't need to include our worldbuilding in the stories that we write: all we have to do is make sure that the action conforms to our worldbuilding. For example, if our speculation about artificial gravity suggests that it has side effects, we...

You can't copyright ideas: only specific expressions of them, like finished novels. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and unlikely to be stolen. What's more, if someone else uses your idea as the basis for their own novel, it will almost inevitably differ from your own novel enough to avoid any...

In military scenarios, weapons that incapacitate might supersede weapons that kill, because dead bodies are more easily abandoned than live but incapacitated soldiers, whose injuries demand attention. With this in mind, flying robots or transgenic organisms ranging from mosquito-sized to...