Memories of Angkor Wat – 1995

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In March 1995, I spent two weeks in Cambodia and was able to make a visit to Angkor Wat. At that time, the Khmer Rouge were still active. As part of the peace process following the civil war of the 1980s, the UN-sponsored elections in 1993. The Khmer Rouge excluded itself from the peace process and maintained control of areas in northwestern Cambodia, in the provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat was located), and neighbouring Thailand. Its forces numbered around 10,000 fighters and were able to extend Khmer Rouge control to more than half a million Cambodians, four times as many as before the peace accords. During the dry season in late 1994 and early 1995, the Khmer Rouge adopted new tactics, including the murder of civilians, the systematic destruction of civilian homes and rice fields, looting, rape and the kidnapping and murder of Westerners.

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The 2025 US coup and the triumph of pre-modern values

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The world is witnessing a coup taking place in the USA as Trump and Musk set about dismantling the US government, ignoring all congressional legislation and fiscal authority. The Constitution has effectively been suspended. Trump and Musk are leading extra-governmental operatives (young white male engineers employed by Musk) who have seized control of the Treasury payment system, and IT systems in other agencies such as USAID. They are starting to eliminate agencies created by Congress, the first being USAID. They are suspending payments authorized by law, re-interpreting the Constitution, and ignoring the judiciary. Already, several judges have made orders suspending various of their activities. They are being ignored. Ultimately, much later, such orders may end up in the Supreme Court who have already ruled that Trump has immunity for official actions.

What has led to this? How did the world’s richest man and a deeply ignorant psychopathic criminal get to seize control of government in the USA?

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Meditation and the nature of consciousness

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What is the role of meditation and other first-person evidence  in understanding the nature of consciousness and addressing the hard problem of consciousness?

I have been directly exploring the nature of consciousness for over 30 years, primarily through meditation, but also through self-hypnosis, breath work, and psychedelics. About three years ago, I decided to explore in more depth what neuroscientists and philosophers had to say about consciousness, to complement and possibly revise what I had learnt through direct experience.  From mid-2022 to present, I have published nine posts on consciousness here summarizing my readings in neuroscience and philosophy, and their impact on my own understanding of consciousness. Links to these are given at the end of this post.

Neuroscientists and first-person evidence

Consciousness is a first-person experience and can only be examined directly by each person individually. My conscious experience cannot be directly observed by anyone else. In contrast, neuroscience and science in general work with third-person objective observations and measures, which can in principle be made by anyone. It can thus only deal with the correlates of conscious experience.

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Four new records set in Swiss Powerlifting Championships 2024

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My younger son Felix Strong competed in the Swiss Full Power Championships in Steinmaur on 28 September. He competed in the T3 (18-19 year) age category and in the 82.5-90 kg weight class. 

He was the best male lifter of the competition. Swiss Champion 2024, with a total of 645 kg, beating the current world record for his age weight class by 15 kg.

Dad, Felix, Mum and Chris (Felix’s coach) in from of the 275 kg bar that he lifted.

He did extremely well, setting new Swiss records for all three lifts and for the total: squat 220 kg, bench press 150 kg, deadlift 275 kg and total 645 kg (1422 lb). His deadlift was 10 kg higher than the current world record of 265 kg. Short videos of his three lifts are below.

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Are atheists more moral than most Christians?

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I have compared the moral values of atheists and theists using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study for the last 20 years.  This survey program includes 262 surveys in 112 countries over the period 2004-2021, with a total sample size of 386.870 respondents. See here for more details on the survey program.

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Powerlifting after total knee replacement – Part 2.

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Summary

There appear to be no long-term studies of people who do serious strength training or powerlifting in particular after joint replacement.

Current total knee replacement prostheses utilizing ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene bearings can be expected to last more than 20 years, with a cumulative rate of revision surgery of less than 10% at 20 years.

Polyethylene wear due to contact pressure and other consequences of higher load force may be responsible for up to 40 to 50% of problems resulting in revision surgery.

Polyethylene wear rates appear to be well-described by Archard’s Law which states that the wear rate is essentially proportional to the contact pressure on the polyethylene surface and hence to the loading force on the joint.

From analysis of videos of my lifts, I estimate that time under a loaded bar for a single squat is around 11 seconds and for a single deadlift around 5 seconds. I have estimated the total time under loads higher than bodyweight is 10 minutes per week averaged across two of my typical powerlifting training programs for squat and deadlift. This works out at the equivalent of an additional 22 minutes per week with bodyweight load. 

Based on reported average activity levels of people aged 65 and over, the additional 22 minutes under load results in an average increase in the rate of cumulative wear debris of 1-2%. This would result in a 2% increase in the expected TKR revision rate at 20 years from 8.7% to 8.9%. Calculations for hip replacement result in a similar increase in expected revision rate.

Powerlifting training after joint replacements by an experienced lifter with attention to technique and careful progression appears unlikely to significantly decrease hip or knee replacement lifetimes. Indeed, the improvements in muscular strength around these joints from training may result in less forces acting in the joint across all activities and more than offset the effects of higher loads on wear.

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Consciousness: natural or supernatural?

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I recently read an article on Medium in which Prudence Louise argued that consciousness is fatal to the philosophy of naturalism. Consciousness is supernatural, and the hard problem is the impossible problem because consciousness is not natural.

I was astonished. Consciousness is clearly part of our reality and its existence was famously termed the “the hard problem” by the philosopher David Chalmers. In a previous post, I described how Chalmers set himself the following constraints in tackling the hard problem. First, to take consciousness seriously and not redefine it as something else (as per Daniel Dennett). Second, to take science seriously in the domains where it has authority. Third, to take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon.

Why does Prudence Louise think consciousness must be supernatural? She correctly points out that we have no evidence that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, though many people, and most neurologists assume it must be. We don’t have any theory of emergence, a proposed mechanism to explain how consciousness could emerge. I agree with her so far.

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Competing in the 2024 World Single Lift Championships after two joint replacements

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A little over a week ago, I competed in the WDFPF World Drug-Free Single Lift Championships in Aalsmeer, Netherlands, on 1-2 June 2024.

It is now a little over two years since I had a total knee replacement of my left knee, and then six months later also a hip replacement of my right hip (see here). After the surgery and a month or so of rehab work with a physio, I started doing some powerlifting training building up very gradually over 18 months to a national competition in September 2023 (see here). At that competition, I qualified to compete at international level in the bench press and deadlift.

I made an application to compete in the World Single Lift Championships in 2024. My son Felix Strong had competed in the 2023 World Championships in Sardinia and set a world record of 260 kg for the deadlift (see here and here). He decided not to compete this year, because his final exams were scheduled through most of May. However, at the last minute, he changed his mind and also decided to apply.

Three Swiss athletes competed at the World Championships in Aalsmer, close to Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands.  Like Felix, Gina Berther had also set a world record for the deadlift in Sardinia last year (195 kg) and was also competing in all three lifts.

Felix Strong, Colin Mathers and Gina Berther, Opening Ceremony, World Championships 2024
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What proportion of the population are actively religious across the world? 

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I recently encountered a discussion about which countries are the most and least religious. This post presents some comprehensive results for the year 2020 based on my earlier analyses of global, regional and country-level trends in religious belief and practice, and the prevalence of atheism (see earlier posts here, here, and here). These analyses used data for 110 countries from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS), covering the period 1981 to 2020 [1-3]. In previous analyses, I defined four religiosity categories as follows:

Practicing religious person: A religious person who believes in God* and is practicing**, OR a non-religious person who believes in God, is practicing, and rates the importance of God in the top 5 points of a 10 points scale.

Non-practicing religious person: A religious person who believes in God and is non-practicing OR a non-religious person who believes in God, is non-practicing, and rates the importance of God in the top 6 points.

Non-religious: A non-religious person who believes in God but rates the importance of God as any of three points at the not important end of a 10-point scale.

Atheist: A “confirmed atheist” and/or does not believe in God

Respondents were classified as “practicing” if they attend religious services or pray to God outside of religious  services at least once a month. I assigned all people who do not believe in God to the atheist category. This will include some religious people who practice non-theist religions such as Buddhism.

For this post, I decided to move the atheists who said they practiced religion at least once a month to the “practicing religious person” category.  In most of the regions where the prevalence of atheism was high, the percent of atheists who are practicing religious is small, at most a few percent. Its likely these are regions where there is no stigma or danger in being atheist, and the few percent practicing are likely attending religious services with other family members who are religious. In regions where the prevalence of atheism is very low, the proportion of atheists who attend religious services is generally much higher (30-40%), almost certainly reflecting stigma and danger in being openly atheist.

I moved the proportion of atheists who are practicing religious to the practicing religious category for the maps below. This adjustment makes little difference to the results. The first map shows the global variations in the proportion of country populations who are practicing religious.

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Will AIs (artificial intelligence) become conscious?

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In my previous posts on consciousness, I noted that Annaka Harris, David Chalmers and Anil Seth all had some discussion in their books of the likelihood that machine minds could become conscious . I’ll start with the philosophers.

Daniel Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion, so has nothing useful to say. David Chalmers on the other hand has a lot to say. In his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory Chalmers argues for a general principle that consciousness is an organizational invariant, i.e., that “functional organization fully determines conscious experience. In other words, if a silicon brain is organized identically to a human brain, it will also be conscious. He argues the case for this principle using a thought experiment in which physical components of the brain are replaced one at a time by silicon components. He claims that it makes no sense to think that the consciousness of the brain would either fade as the process continues or disappear at some point.

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