Sean Carroll

Nevertheless, I can root for the New York Knicks in their current incarnation, in part because literally three out of their five starting players came from Villanova.

And the interesting thing there is that Jay Wright, who used to be the coach at Villanova, he only found success as a coach in his own words once he stopped recruiting the highest ranking basketball players and started recruiting people who fit into the system.

people who would buy in and really play the right way and all those other cliches, rather than just those who could shoot the highest percentage and jump the highest and things like that.

So you might think that that kind of strategy is exactly what would play well in college basketball, but ultimately those players wouldn't be huge successes in the NBA.

Turns out they're also huge successes in the NBA.

So I can root for New York.

I do think that...

They not only humiliated the Sixers, they went on to then humiliate the Cleveland Cavaliers in the conference finals.

And so now they're headed to the NBA finals where they will face either the San Antonio Spurs or Oklahoma City Thunder.

I think whoever comes out of the West, either Oklahoma City or San Antonio, will be pretty strongly favored in that series.

But...

Having watched the Knicks clean the floor with the 76ers, they're legit.

They're good.

And I think that they're going to surprise some people by doing better than expected in the NBA finals.

Really, like all of my, like 98% of my emotional attachment to basketball is rooting for the Sixers and against the Celtics.

As long as it's anyone else playing, I can just enjoy the game.

Balder says, the scenario of the philosophical zombie, in all honesty, felt to me not even worth thinking about because it seems so obviously constructed.

But then again, could AI be a real world example for the described zombie, acting human on requests, delivering motion pictures and sounds so real that it seems human, but having nothing going on inside?

No, it could not.

There might be a family resemblance and there might be very, very interesting questions about the extent to which AI can mimic human behaviors without undergoing the conscious inner life that we attribute to ourselves.