>>17851820
>despite being the biggest country on the planet
Size doesn't matter irl and can actually be a hindrance. Part of why Russia stayed a serfdom state until the 19th century is partly because they had only virtual control over their peripheries. The local Cossack and religious figures were the rulers, by virtue of being the only ones possible locally, which lead to atomized communities with brutal local leaders.

>having the most resources
Gas is cool but isn't anything spectacular. They don't have the same potentials as the Saudis or other arab countries. It's surprisingly one of the few assets that make the russian economy relevant.

>having more people than most of the rest of Europe put together?
Europe is 740 million people ; Russia is 140 million people.

>Only explanation seems cultural to me
The explanation is that they had a very autocratic dynasty that maintained serfdom for very long for a plurality of reasons, which pushed away the average Russian from individualism and very tolerant of their conditions. The cossacks had somewhat of a frontier mindset but these were part of the lower nobility iirc. When the Bolsheviks came to power, it made things worse by centralizing the russian state even more and imposing a totalitarian regimes. As all totalitarian regimes before the advent of mass communication, the USSR was deeply plagued by a local aristocracy of bureaucrats and by inefficiencies which lead itself to delay its full exploitation of its potential. Since then, they've been unable to change because one man has assumed control over the country and switched from a fight against capitalism to a fight against "western degeneracy".
This is somewhat revealing of their conditions in general. Putin doesn't even need to be a totalitarian ruler because the russians are indeed somewhat tolerant of their abuse. As long as some form of essence is given to their state with bare conditions they'll abide with it.

>>17804863
Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the brain so is attached to the brain. It relies on sensory transcription into comprehensible data that is then understood by the person. Try it yourself, you'll realize you're only experiencing "qualia" and are "conscious" when you think. If you turn your head 90 degrees quickly, you'll see that you can only be conscious of what you see through memories and translation of your element (i.e. there is a wall, that wall is white etc)

>>17806870
nta but
>Even hardcore materialists still can't explain away consciousness
Not in the sense you think. It's true that materialists don't have empirical evidence for consciousness, but that is also the case for dualists or literally any consciousness model. In reality, materialists and even physicalists have theories about consciousness, which are about as consistent and logical than dualists.

>[...] executing preprogrammed commands
The irony about this statement is that it was proven true lol. Humans act before they are aware of the things they do. There was a psychological study done on this topic that showed that humans actions and choices happen before the brain is conscious of said-choices (Libet experiment in the 1980s).

>You presuppose it's in the brain; I advance in contrast that it could be in some non-material substance.
Youre advocating for a brain outside of the body, it's redundant and somewhat pointless because we have evidence that the brain does indeed perform operations and store locally memories

>>17809225
>I read the wiki page on the hard problem because it popped up on /his/ 4 months ago so I'm smarter than the rest