The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.
In this vein, you should try the food you are given before seasoning, adding salt, or covering it in sauce.
But the recipe didn't use enough garlic!
Everyone knows 1 clove of garlic means 4
Amen!
If the recipe isn't great, you'll know and maybe make changes to salvage it. My family has several recipes like that, where the original is "meh", but after tinkering it becomes a staple.
Most notable are our chocolate chip cookies. They started out as Toll House, but now includes browned butter, better chocolate chips and a few other techniques that makes complex tasting cookies.
Yeah, and sometimes even if a recipe isnβt what I want itβs still a simple way to peer into someone elseβs culture or life.
Reminds me of people who review recipes poorly after substituting half the ingredients. Incredible
I struggle with this when I come up against an instruction that my experience tells me is a very bad idea. Especially since I make a lot of recipes from random blogs. I have to determine what weird instructions will result in a cool new experience verses what will ruin a dish because the author is an idiot.
Everyone should be able to do whatever makes them happy, so long as what makes them happy does not unreasonably infringe upon the happiness of another.
An it harm none, do what thou wilt.
Just an archaic way of saying the same thing. I like it though, cause it reminds me we're not supposed to harm ourselves, either...
I like it! I guess I could have also simply said βlive and let live.β
I believe that housing, education, food, and healthcare should be universally guaranteed.
That's a political view though, not a philosophical one, unless it has a philosophical underpinning.
I think that claiming these thoughts are political views is a political view.
Soo communism?
It wouldn't have to be communism. We could do it in the US today without changing capital ownership. The government would just have a lot less money to spend on anything else (how much this would be is up for debate).
I commented this the other day, but we literally already do this in small ways, social security being the most obvious example.
And it's not as if society is going to stop functioning if we give people basic nutrition and four walls. Probably the opposite - our current system crushes people into poverty and keeps them there. I think people don't understand just how hard it is to be poor. Go work 8-14 hours a day doing one or more jobs, then come home and figure out how to feed your family when you can't afford convenience foods like... bread. Because $0.50 of flour and such vs $1.99 of sliced bread literally matters to you. And then you're supposed to figure out how to learn something else in your off time, which is the 6ish hours you also need to sleep.
If we gave everyone housing and UBI, would there be some people that absolutely did nothing else? Sure. Would there be others that finally have enough physical and mental capacity to do something amazing? Abso-fucking-lutely. See also, the story of the vast majority of wealthy people.
Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.
The fundamental starting point that the universe is objectively indifferent. Nothing matters to it, which ultimately means that we humans are the only ones ascribing subjective values. Good, bad, happy, sad. Any purpose in life is human made, we are what makes things matter - giving our corner of the universe the ability to think, feel, want etc.
But if we are entirely natural processes ourselves then what we think, feel, ascribe value to is the universe doing it. Just in a rather complex way.
And while it cant be extrapolated to other complex processes, part of our natural existence is seeking out those pattens even in the universe - for some it even helps using human experience analogous to complex mechanisms.
QED we should be able to treat the universe like just a lil Buddy of you want to
While the universe is indifferent because it is not conscious, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that there is a pattern to the goals that rational minds that can exist in this universe find attractive.This pattern would be an objective structure to morality and arguably would qualify as an inherent purpose to the universe
It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they'd still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.
Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I'm not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don't think I died, even though there's this huge gap in my mind and the "me" from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn't necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.
Life after death! Neat.
Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.
So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?
So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she's only like ~80% accurate then that's just fine. I'd much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol
So the interesting part in my mind for this is that you would die and be gone, there would just exist another entity that can perfectly replicate you. Take for example the case of there being two of you, which one is the real one? The original? What if I kill the original? Does the new one become the real you? But what if I don't kill you but let the duplicate replace your life. Are you the real you trapped in some cell, or is the duplicate the real you living your life?
My point really is that it's all a matter of perspective. For everyone else the clone would be the real you, but from your perspective you are the real you and the clone stole your life.
Sort of begs the question by assuming there should be one "real you". Why is this a restriction? Why not two real yous?
You an hour from now is every bit you as the you that exists 2 hours from now. They're not identical, but both exist, same space just at different points in time. So why not two "yous", not identical, at the same time just at different points in space?
Because there being two real yous doesn't make sense. Like you can have two identical things but they can not be the same thing, there must be a you #1 and a you #2. Like if I have two water bottles, they are two identical things but they are not the same thing. Changing one of them does not affect the other, thus they are not the same thing.
I'm not saying they're identical, I'm saying they're both "you". That's different.
There are many "you"s already. Consider "you" at different points in time. You recognise it's all the same individual, but they are not identical.
Hence my last sentence. We're comfortable with a variety of non-identical "you"s separated by time. So why not a variety of non-identical "you"s at same time, only separated by space.
Our definition of identity is not tight because it doesn't have to deal with situations like these. We having a working definition something like "the continuous experience of memories, personality and sensation in a body" that serves to help us identify the "you" from yesterday as the same person as the "you" now. They're not identical. What they have in common is a shared continuous physicality.
But if some sci-fi type cloning were possible where two "you"s step out from the one, then both could claim to have a shared continuous physical continuity with the "you" now. And as such both have the same and equal claim on who is the "real" one. As because of that why can't they both be you? Both with separate ongoing experiences. But both "you" in every bit the same way as you claim to be the same "you" as yesterday.
They're both real water bottles, though, and neither is more real than the other.
Yes, my point is that they aren't the same bottle.
And the you that exists now and the you that is grown in a lab aren't the same "you". You're both legitimate versions, though.
I'm not my body and I'm not my mind. I am the ethical soul, the decision-making process. If the replacement makes all the same decisions I would, it IS me.
The thought process assumes it is a complete and perfect cloning of all aspects we do and don't understand. The reason the clone is not you is because if I do something to the clone it does not affect you.
Like if you take a water bottle and clone it, drinking one does not cause the other to be empty. Thus they must be two separate things.
If both the original and the clone are identical, then at that moment they are both me, and neither is more valid than the other. That there's two of me does not invalidate either version. Neither do their divergences going forward.
What if something like ChatGPT is trained on a dataset of your life and uses that to make the same decisions as you? It doesn't have a mind, memories, emotions, or even a phenomenal experience of the world. It's just a large language data set based on your life with algorithms to sort out decisions, it's not even a person.
Is that you?
No, because not all my decisions are language-based. As gotchas go, this one's particularly lazy.
I'm having a hard time imagining a decision that can't be language based.
You come to a fork in the road and choose to go right. Obviously there was no language involved in that decision, but the decision can certainly be expressed with language and so a large language model can make a decision.
But I don't make all my decisions linguistically. A model that did would never act as I do.
It doesn't matter how it comes to make a decision as long as the outcome is the same.
Sorry, this is beside the point. Forget ChatGPT.
What I meant was a set of algorithms that produce the same outputs as your own choices, even though it doesn't involve any thoughts or feelings or experiences. Not a true intelligence, just an NPC that acts exactly like you act. Imagine this thing exists. Are you saying that this is indistinguishable from you?
"Is something that acts exactly like you act indistinguishable from you?"
Well, yes.
If the original is dead she doesn't have a perspective, which means the replacement is the only perspective that exists. As such, she is equally the real me just like I am.
My replacement can have my life if I'm not using it - in fact, I want her to! It'd be a shame if my life went to waste because I was dead.
Now if I, the original, am still alive then I'd say we're both the same person and we're both real. Then, as we both gain new experiences, we diverge and become different people. Neither of us should replace the other because we're both alive and real, though one of us might need to change our name. Even then? We'll flip a coin to see who keeps the original name.
That's an interesting thought experiment.
Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol
Well, you just gave me an idea I did not have before.
I'm a simple person. My main philosophy for just about everything is: "if everyone did this, would the world be a better place?"
Things I do, things I say, things I think. I know I won't change the world (much). But I won't make it worse.
You sound like you'd enjoy reading Emmanuel Kant
I hate the state of our world as it is right now. It's been itching inside my head for quite some time alreadu. It probably is somewhat political, because it probably has something to do with capitalism, but I can't understand how a population that has never been so productive still has to work their ass off in order to simply eat and lay in a bed safely. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes and the more I hate how natural it is for seemingly everyone around me.
I'm not one of these people, despite also not being wealthy at all, I have a job, I don't get paid top dollar but I have a safe house, food on the table and I can do a little bit more with my money, and yes, that's it, EVERYTHING seems to revolve around money.
We have a huge amount of resources for very little effort though. Back in the day you could work your ass off in the field all day, but there was no medical technology to cure illness, no vast swaths of entertainment options, no heating to keep you warm (unless you made a fire), and no hamburger that could be delivered to your door with the touch of a button. If you could not starve, lose a toe to frostbite, or die during childbirth, you were doing pretty well.
Right now you've probably never had to deal with hunger - even those under the poverty line can sustain a nutritionally decent diet (albeit an insanely boring one) in the developed world, your life expectancy is somewhere between 75 and 90, the water you drink is clean, there are no soldiers looking to skin you to death, and you're lying on a fluffy mattress stuffing popcorn into your face. If you're an average person, you probably have access to luxuries that were completely inaccessible just a few generations ago, and your working conditions are far better even if you find them boring.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the suffering you might argue exists is preventable. You're not obligated to eat unhealthy foods, watch crummy netflix movies all day, have children (well, unless an old white dude decided otherwise), smoke, etc. The balance of individual choice vs. external influence is debatable, but certainly preferable to having no choice at all.
If you don't directly pay for a product but engage with it, you are still supporting it. You are driving up user metrics, generating ad revenue, creating content for others (videogames, social media). It's complete nonsense to claim you are against something but then continue to use it
This does apply to the current Reddit situation but I formulated this view a while back after quitting Gacha games, people playing those titles looooooove talking about how they would never pay a penny due to the evil monetization but they have no qualms about recruiting friends, writing positive reviews, being content for paying players to lord over, creating guilds etc.
I feel this way about money.
Human cognition/consciousness is not special. There have likely been many now-extinct intelligent species whose evolutionary niche did not encourage the indefinite expansion and subsequent habitat destruction that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, other intelligent species will likely evolve after we are extinct. There is also no reason to believe that consciousness is unique to biological creatures, although mechanical sapience will most likely look very different from ours.
Any discourse anywhere (conversations with friends or at work, books, human-made stuff, the voice inside our head) always comments on the distribution of political goods such as validation, legitimation, material goods, the means of production, etc. Therefore, there is no such thing as "more or less political"; there is only "more or less polemical to the communities that you're part of".
Antinatalism. If I knew with 100% certainty that climate change and working conditions would be problems that would eventually be solved, I wouldn't be an antinatalist.
What is antinatalism? Is that like being child-free?
It's the belief that's it's immoral to create a child. This is a pretty broad definition so even I might disagree with other antinatalists while still being one.
Me being antinatalist is conditional and the condition is if the world is becoming worse for regular people. Others believe humans are evil or are a cancer and while I can sympathize to some degree, I think it's a step too far. XD
Having said that antinatalism and child-free are not mutually exclusive because an antinatalist could adopt a child.
I see, very interesting. I think I can gel with some aspects of antinatalism, like in your example of the world becoming worse for regular people yet still being open to adoption.
You can also ask an adjacent question, which is whether we should attempt to continue to exist as a species. My personal take would be a hard no - I think it would be preferable to seek to end our species within the next few generations - but some would argue that we should attempt to colonize space and maximize our presence.
Why wouldn't this always be true, since we all suffer? How do you determine the max level of expected suffering to make it moral to have kids?
The maximum level is the level at which a) the average sentient being of that generation can be expected to live a net positive life, b) the addition of another does not reduce the positivity of other lives, and c) the individual being itself would live a net positive life. What is considered a net positive is its own question since pleasure exceeding suffering is subjective, but there's a strong argument to be made that there is an increasing net negative, and that's not nearly limited to the climate change argument (in fact that's probably one of the weaker angles one can take).
You can also go sliding scale, though you'd have to compete with the eugenics argument (which is possible), and say that some children are worth bringing into the world and others are not. For example, huge net negatives would be someone who sucks up so many resources that they make the average human life worse or someone whose circumstances make them far more likely to live a qualitatively poor life.
That the only resource a person intrinsically has is time, and that everyone's time is worth the same and invaluable.
If you could play god and either cause a distraction for me (on holiday) or a surgeon at work that lasts an hour, the choice seems obvious. How would you account for that?
That there is absolutely nobody and nothing in this world that wants to do me harm or ruin my day. Stuff happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Nobody is out to get you, everyone has something more important to do.
While mostly true, someone out there always wants to genocide you.
Fair. But I like to think that's less about me and more about them.
Why could "getting you" not be a person's most important to-do item? Would Putin not benefit greatly from getting Zelensky? Would the person up for a promotion not benefit from sabotaging their competition? Would a drug lord not benefit if his competition accidentally slipped and fell and died? There are so many instances in which a person would very logically (not to mention emotionally) benefit from targeting you personally - that's basically the foundation of politics and resource distribution.
Nobody's out to get you personally. They want your shit. Or they want you out of their way on their quest for more shit. Either giving them your shit or getting out of the way will cease you being a perceived threat towards them. In your examples the drug lord/person being promoted isn't targeting their competition personally (as a person), just whomever happens to be the competition. If nobody steps up as a competitor, they have no reason to kill (except as a threat to chill would-be competitors out of the game).
Outside of a few very niche cases of psychotic mental illness, nobody wants to kill. It's so much effort even predators in the wild tend to leave each other alone in favor of prey that won't fight back and maybe kill/injure them. It's why black bears can be scared off and grizzlies/polar bears can't. If you can prove yourself enough of a threat, the animal is going to fuck off to live another day.
First and foremost, treat people like people.
I always liked Bill and Ted's take on it.
Be excellent to each other.
And...party on dude.
See we must be excellent to each other first because that is the most important thing. Then we can all party on.
When forced to choose, minimizing harm should always be prioritized over maximizing good. I more mean this in terms of utilitarianism, but even outside of that framework, improving things seems to cause more problems than working towards equity, and once equity is closer it is easier to improve things after.
Consciousness is not material.
Free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.
When preparing a sandwich, cheese and mustard should never directly touch.
Cheese and mustard always go together. Iβm sorry.
Free will is a bullshit term
I hold the opinion that free will is not compatible in a universe with physics. Decisions can be random, but I donβt think the concept of βfree willβ, as every decision comes from the randomness of the universe, and outside factors. Not βconsciousnessβ
How does the fact that point of observation affects the outcome of the experiment fit into this? If there is no consciousness, why does it matter where you observe, as in the case of varying outcomes of the double slit experiment?
The "observer" doesn't have to even be conscious.
I don't believe in determinism or free will, though. The universe is full of random bullshit and nothing matters π
Aren't most philosophers unanimous on this? That the concept of free will can only exist in a world with beings that can act outside the natural world (i.e. god).
Bruh you really gonna use "most" and "unanimous" side-by-side like that?
Lmao good point. Should have said "most philosophers agree'
Consciousness is a side effect of the structures physics has created in our brains. We have consciousness because of the atoms in our brain that interact with each other in different ways.
That doesn't sound like someone who believes nothing matters. This would sound more like it:
dfakjdsnhabfkjdhfjksdabckjadsbnvchievfbiq4rjwiofhewnJSABjaksbjakdbjbdahbDHBHabshbSHbhbHSBABHDBSHDBbhba
If we don't have to kill and abuse others we should not do it just for pleasure.
Probably not all that groundbreaking, but I hadnβt thought of it until recently:
Brutality is a function of societal evolution. The societies that grow and expand do so, not only because of some technological or cultural advancement, but in large part due to their willingness and propensity to conquer and dominate other societies, often in brutal ways.
Peace is hard, in part, because the human desire for power is baked into all the major remaining people and cultures- any society that leans towards peace will eventually be overtaken by one that doesnβt.
Live and let live. Easy as pie.
Truth and falsehood can overlap. In other words, that contradictions can be true. The reason for this is paradoxes like the liar's paradox. The sentence, "this sentence is false," is both true and false at the same time in the same sense. Building on that, mathematics made the wrong choice philosophically when they modified the axioms of set theory instead of changing the logic in which it was embedded and keeping naive comprehension and extensionality
I like this one. Although having spent a lot of my life in digital logic, gates, ones and zeros.... I also hate it.
The best way to get what you want is to provide it to others. It works for love and compassion but itβs also good material advice. If you truly love bread, become a baker and youβll have the most. Even if you just bake bread casually at home and give it to friends, youβll still have bread around all the time.
I'll contribute mine: I'm pro-extinctionism. In basic terms, I think it would be preferable for our species to slowly start to pack up shop.
How is this not overtly political? π
That really is a controversial one. I don't believe this will ever happen on purpose and could never be achieved without forcing other people to comply through violence. I get believing people suck and that the universe would be better off without us, but it is nearly impossible for extinction to be willingly realized. I just donβt like the idea of forcing people like that.
The only place free will source from is quantum randomness.
Also, better believe in free will. If you are wrong, it wasn't really your choice, and if you are right you can do more.
Randomness doesn't give us free will. It gives us chaos. No free will and no fate, just bullshit.
Well, how do you define free will?
I thought about it for quite some time and defined it for myself as following: free will is possibility to make two different choices in identical (down to quantum level and below) set of two universes. That applies only to something that has a "will", which is yet to be defined.
If being in identical circumstances you predictably make identical decisions, that doesn't look like free will to me. Your choice was made by circumstances for you.
So yeah, chaos it is. Nothing bad in it.
There is no such thing as common sense, just logic and stupidity. One can move from one category to the other through trial and error, but don't ever believe that something is "common sense" because your view on something is not the same as someone else.
Common sense is also code for 'something I learned passively through my environment and assume everyone else should have too.'
This is a good one, I've fallen into this trap myself several times. Thinking something's just common sense, only to be disappointed by the person I put my faith in.
Time is likely B-theoretic, not A-theoretic. There is no absolute simultaneity, so the relations between points in time are probably best described in the B-theory.
Substance dualism is a silly conjecture, and neutral monism is just a sad attempt to grant legitimacy to shoddy arguments about mental constructs existing as some kind of concretia. It's dualism in sheep's clothing.
The only thing sillier than substance dualism is substance idealism.
Universals are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nominalism and particularism are better views of what actually exists.
There is no such thing as an essentially ordered series. While they're useful abstracts, in reality all series are accidentally ordered.
Of the four causes, only material and essential usefully describe anything. Formal and final causes are, again, only useful in the abstract.
I could go on, but I doubt anyone's still awake...
No I love this. Fuck dualism, all my homies hate dualism.
Glad it wasn't completely unintelligible to everyone. Any background in philosophy?
Used to be one of my main hobbies, yes.
tbh I would love a longer post that explains all this for normies like me
I'm going to attempt to understand this. Tell me where I'm wrong.
No idea what A or B theory means, but relativity kind of blows a hole in simultaneity, so I assume that B theory has other implications like determinism or something. Something about relationships defining everything.
Chairs only exist in our brains I guess. Brains also invented themselves. Spooky
Plato is silly?
This might have some implications about there not being underlying rules to reality, or that we can never really get anything more than a shadow of them.
Not sure about this one. It might be more epistemological than metaphysical.
The creation and end of existence aren't as important as the rules and the observable state of things?
I could google these things, but I had fun doing it this way.
Solid! I'm going to put together a broader and more detailed comment that should clarify some things, but if you're a newbie to philosophy, you did a pretty darn good job.
We aren't special. Conciousness is a side effect of having so many neurons shaped by millions of years of social and environmental darwinism. We are actually barely concious to avoid confronting the fact that we are just walking meat.
If human head transplants were done, we would have proof that the soul is just a sophisticated algorithm held within our meat, but even then, our barely concious state will refuse to compute the actual implications.
Further our "singular conscious" is an illusion. People with various types of physical brain damage have had their awareness "split" and had something akin to two different consciouses in their brain. Even for "normal" people there are independent processes running in our brain. Our consciousness is in charge sort of the way the teacher is in charge of the nursey school. It might decide when recess is but it can't stop that one kid from just singing for no reason.
Also to your point I think that if we could transplant a head we'd find that our sentience involves more than the brain. I think we underestimate how connected all of our systems are.
Panpsychism has merit.
Yeah, I don't know that it solves much, but it's rather tidy to take the one think we know exists (consciousness) and fit it into a fundamental question (what makes up the universe).
I have a saying, if the people no longer respect the government rules, shall the state end up in anarchy.
There's no such thing as free will
I'm not sure that it matters
Not really I suppose
My trial is ending soon, should I upgrade to the paid version?
Yeah I'd recommend it
βConsciousnessβ is not a multitude instances of which you have one of, itβs something singular that has you.
We are all the same weird mirror rippling through space-time trying to figure out how to outfox entropy.
I've always thought that what makes me the most happy is trying not to care about material things. Just stuff I make myself is what I care about most. I made my own music player app and it's garbage compared to everything else available but I still love it. I feel like this is a pretty popular opinion to hold though.
What is your music player app?
"Free will", as almost anyone defines it, is completely indistinguishable from no free will.
Also: The universe exists as a manifestation of pure math. In the same sense that the answer to "What is 9827349328659327498327592432^98374239563298473298324253?" exists even if nobody bothers to actually calculate it, the answer to "What does a universe with [these] parameters look like at t = 13.7 billion years look like?" exists as well - and it looks like you. A lot of people agree that it might be in principle possible to simulate the universe - even if it requires something silly like a computer larger than the universe. I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
My hunch (and this is just a hunch) is that in some cases this might be true but not in the general case. The universe contains turning machines. So one cannot arbitrarily determine a future state without also disproving the Halting Problem.
I'm not sure if you quoted the right portion of my message - but I don't think the halting problem plays any part in this scenario. It's perfectly possible to simulate a computer running a program with an unknown halting state - there's no real need to know if or when a nested program will halt to simulate it anyways. The arbitrary future state you want to determine may just have it in a non-halted state. The simulation itself is likely non-halting.
I want to clarify that I say "simulation", but I don't mean it in the sense it's usually used at all - I think our universe is as real as real gets. I think of it like this xkcd. If you accept that the universe can in principle be simulated (Such that you, as an inhabitant of the universe, would notice no difference), then why not accept that it can be so simulated with rocks? And if you can accept that your entire existence and subjective experience is determined by rock placement in a desert - then why require the rocks at all? To me, the fact that the universe is mathematically consistent is then enough for it to exist - at least as far as it and its inhabitants are concerned.
I will admit that non-determinism from quantum randomness makes this all a bit hairier / fuzzier, but I don't think it invalidates the whole thing at all.
Hard determinism. Everything is a number and has already happened. Also, one electron universe.
Apple and Android both need to exist. Apple isn't your friend and market privacy to take a market and when they have it they will shit on it. Google doesn't care about your privacy but are at least working on doing better and are trying to unite platforms.
Don't put your eggs in one basket.
This too shall pass. Enjoy what you can, but don't get attached to it. You can even become deeply involved in something or with someone, but always be emotionally and mentally prepared for the day when it or they are no more. Expect it.
I think calling anything I think or hold to possibly be true a "belief" is not quite accurate. I don't really have faith or anything like that. I believe things that can be proven to be real, and I have ideas that may count as philosophy but without a belief that it is correct or not. Like, I think it's entirely possible for an afterlife of some such to exist. If matter and energy can not be destroyed, only transformed, and our consciousness is a form of energy, then maybe we still retain consciousness after death on a different level of existence which could be attributed to Heaven or Hell or any other religious idea of an afterlife. On the other side of the same possibility, I don't think a God is possible. God is either simply a convenient name for the randomness of the universe, or was an alien race not much different than us, but way, way more advanced technologically.
Is that really philosophical, though?
Optimistic nihilism has always been a favorite. While there may be a purpose to existence, there is no concrete evidence of it. But if indeed life has no meaning, that's not a big deal, because humans are creative and can create our own.
I don't believe in free will meaning that what ever you did you could not have done otherwise. We live in a deterministic universe and all events are part of a causal chain
What difference does it make?
Less judgement for other people mostly. Feeling hate towards someone is almost impossible for me. It's a nonsensical emotion which implies that they could be otherwise. I still dislike some people and don't want to be around them but I don't blame them for it.
But if judgement also works in a purely deterministic way then it has a role to play. One doesn't have to have agency (free will) in order for the negative experience of judgement to result in improved behaviour. Rational judgement discerns whether or not the punishment will reasonably bring about an improvement. As it does in many cases then it doesn't matter that the world's deterministic, good judgement can make it better.
(E.g. it might not be someone's "fault" that they're a mass murderer, but society is still taking the right course of action by denouncing their beliefs and restricting their freedom)
Yeah I agree that no free will doesn't mean we can't affect our own or other people's behaviour. Punishment itself doesn't make any sense but the fear of punishment does deter bad behaviour and yeah obviously mass murderers needs to be locked up. Not as a punishment but to protect others
I more feel sadness that they weren't given the tools to be different and endeavor to provide those tools for people like them in the future.
Optimistic Nihilism.
Consciousness is an accident, the universe is an emergent property of physical laws, and there is no purpose to any of it; no gods, no guiding intention, no natural morality, no afterlife. Just entropy.
This is a good, positive thing to understand.
If there is no intrinsic morality, then we are free to define morality for ourselves. This is a burden, but it something that we can recognise and think critically about, rather than just taking whatever tradition we were raised in, and picking and choosing as is convenient.
If there is no afterlife, then every act of alturism, every kind thing we do we can do because we want to. Not because we are afraid of damnation, but because we decided that it was the right thing to do.
If we leave nothing behind but dust, then we must be aware of the impact we have now, because our time is limited and brief.
If we are a random collection of atoms, a brief coherent pattern among the chaos, then we can recognise that every single other person is the fundamentally the same.
Treat others how you would like to be treated.
Adress others the way you want to be adressed.
I used to subscribe to that, but I've since modified it for myself.
"Treat others as they ask to be treated. Default to treating them as I would like to be treated. Address others as they ask to be addressed."
The philosophical position I hold is that solipsism isn't true. Because to ask yourself if others exist requires language, which we all learn from other people. We can doubt our senses without language, but this is psychosis, not philosophy.
And I think most Western people haven't really solved the question of solipsism and still live in the Cartesian theater. And that this is a major reason why we're mindlessly killing the planet (and ourselves).
How do you even know which things are part of the self and which are 'external'? That feels arbitrary or a 'I know it when I see it' to me.
You could say the self is things you control but under any scrutiny in almost any domain that's not true for what we think of as 'self' either.
I agree solipsism isn't true, but I don't know that I agree you couldn't doubt the external world without language. I think language is just the mechanism we use to describe our inner thoughts. Math is 'real' and describes the world whether you use base 10 or 12 or don't know about math at all.
Well self other is a false dichotomy ultimately. This is what the Buddha means by no self.
Language is how we form concepts, like self amd other. Without these concepts the question of solipsism can not arise.
And language is about communication. Moving information between two points. It presupposes these two positions. And thus falsifies solipsism.
then why does language occur internally and create new things, like you say, if its only function is about moving information:
Because the brain is made up of individual cells moving information around.
How could you convince a solipsist of that? It seems impossible to disprove the position "I am imagining that anything outside my consciousness is real". Anything you cite as evidence is premised on the conclusion.
Language is how we create our stories. The story is "I am imagining that anything outside my consciousness is real."
Without language the story cannot be formulated. But language presupposes an other. It exists to pass information. So the fact that we have language disproves solipsism.
This isn't my argument btw. It's Wittgenstein's argument against Decartes "I think therefore I am". Which was flawed anyway because he still believed in God and the Devil, so two others in Decartes solipsism.
Anyway, it's a hard argument to break because solipsism is so imbedded in Western thinking. I had to drop LSD to break through it and get what Wittgenstein was saying.
Language is how we create our stories.
The hard solipsist would disagree with you already from the 4th word. Your assuming an other to try to convince someone of their existence.
Here are a few theoretical realities:
The Matrix.
The Boltzmann Brain Hypothesis.
You're a higher form of life dreaming.
Last Thursdayism.
The perceived existence of language is compatible with all of these, is it not?
I think there's a difference between solipsism and being skeptical about what your senses are experiencing.
For example, there's an other in the Matrix. It's not a form of Solipsism but a form of prison. Ditto for the brain in a vat. Not sure if that's the brain hypothesis.
Also, me being asleep and dreaming all of this doesn't disprove that others exist. Just that we can't prove that the people we're interacting with currently aren't dream characters. Language still proves that somethone else is out there. Otherwise we imagined the whole thing and imagination is ultimately derivative regardless of what we tell ourselves.
The brain in the vat and matrix also fall into this. Someone else (an other) put you in the box to fool your senses (Descartes made this same fallacy assuming the devil maybe tricking his senses, which is silly to draw the conclusion that the fact you think proves you exist since the devil could surely change your thoughts if he could change everything else you experience).
Not sure what your last example is but I assume it's similar to the other three in essence. If not please let me know and I'll check it out.
And again, not my argument btw, I'm not this smart. It's Wittgenstein's and it was hard to grok at first due to social conditioning. But he's widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the last generation partially because of his debunking solipsism.
Humanity is living in an (almost) endless painful cycle of civilisations rising, prospering and falling, like a phoenix rising from its ashes, only to burn again. No civilisation, nation, or idea can escape. Some might be able to avoid destruction for longer than others, but they will eventually meet their end.
Death is and should be inevitable, and it's a good thing. I have gotten over the fear of dying when I was eight, yet so many people, (way too many of them are adults) seem to treat death as a sensitive and even taboo topic.
I find the thought that I'll most likely be able to rest peacefully either in a state of non-existence or some sort of afterlife to be calming. I tend to think that the acknowledgment of our own mortality is the only thing that makes us truly enjoy life, as we know it won't last forever. This is the reason why people talking about technology that could make immortal people without thinking about the downsides enough really concerns me. Humans are supposed to be born, to live and to die.
If we want to define whether an action is immoral or moral, then as a rule of thumb, it is moral as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. (yes, this includes non-human animals) There are a lot of exceptions of course.
Humans are not superior to other animals. The reason I think that, in general, killing another human is worse than killing another animal is not that human lives matter more than lives of other animals, but instead that you shouldn't kill your own species.
About #3, do you view this as a hard rule? Not the animal part (vegan btw), the "hurting is always wrong" part. There are situation where I've caused harm to someone for the sake of others, their future, or a greater pleasure.
Also interested in the "not killing you own species" section of #4. I would also kill another animal rather than a human, but for other reasons. What do you think about hurting a member of your own species is uniquely bad?
It is not really a hard rule, I think there are a lot of situations where you have to hurt someone such as self-defense, having to eat other animals to survive and such. So it's like a soft rule of thumb, as there are a lot of situations where hurting someone is justified.
And concerning killing your own species versus other animals, I think we naturally tend to have more empathy for other people and especially the ones closer to us. Also killing a non-human animal outside of self-defense can be justified by needing food, but, well, eating another human seems to be worse than eating a cow.
I think as renewable energy gets cheaper and we move away from scarcity in society, we will stop looking at ourselves as brands. Instead, personal conduct, or the appearance of such will play a much larger part in our public lives and place in society. This will provide a lot of privacy issues.
Liberty is the most imprtant thing.
Pre-crime should never be punished, only actual crime.
Gun rights are human rights.
Question porn featuring fictional people (drawn or written) should not be legislated.
The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.
In this vein, you should try the food you are given before seasoning, adding salt, or covering it in sauce.
But the recipe didn't use enough garlic!
Everyone knows 1 clove of garlic means 4
Amen!
If the recipe isn't great, you'll know and maybe make changes to salvage it. My family has several recipes like that, where the original is "meh", but after tinkering it becomes a staple.
Most notable are our chocolate chip cookies. They started out as Toll House, but now includes browned butter, better chocolate chips and a few other techniques that makes complex tasting cookies.
Yeah, and sometimes even if a recipe isnβt what I want itβs still a simple way to peer into someone elseβs culture or life.
Reminds me of people who review recipes poorly after substituting half the ingredients. Incredible
I struggle with this when I come up against an instruction that my experience tells me is a very bad idea. Especially since I make a lot of recipes from random blogs. I have to determine what weird instructions will result in a cool new experience verses what will ruin a dish because the author is an idiot.
Everyone should be able to do whatever makes them happy, so long as what makes them happy does not unreasonably infringe upon the happiness of another.
An it harm none, do what thou wilt.
Just an archaic way of saying the same thing. I like it though, cause it reminds me we're not supposed to harm ourselves, either...
I like it! I guess I could have also simply said βlive and let live.β
I believe that housing, education, food, and healthcare should be universally guaranteed.
That's a political view though, not a philosophical one, unless it has a philosophical underpinning.
I think that claiming these thoughts are political views is a political view.
Soo communism?
It wouldn't have to be communism. We could do it in the US today without changing capital ownership. The government would just have a lot less money to spend on anything else (how much this would be is up for debate).
I commented this the other day, but we literally already do this in small ways, social security being the most obvious example.
And it's not as if society is going to stop functioning if we give people basic nutrition and four walls. Probably the opposite - our current system crushes people into poverty and keeps them there. I think people don't understand just how hard it is to be poor. Go work 8-14 hours a day doing one or more jobs, then come home and figure out how to feed your family when you can't afford convenience foods like... bread. Because $0.50 of flour and such vs $1.99 of sliced bread literally matters to you. And then you're supposed to figure out how to learn something else in your off time, which is the 6ish hours you also need to sleep.
If we gave everyone housing and UBI, would there be some people that absolutely did nothing else? Sure. Would there be others that finally have enough physical and mental capacity to do something amazing? Abso-fucking-lutely. See also, the story of the vast majority of wealthy people.
Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.
The fundamental starting point that the universe is objectively indifferent. Nothing matters to it, which ultimately means that we humans are the only ones ascribing subjective values. Good, bad, happy, sad. Any purpose in life is human made, we are what makes things matter - giving our corner of the universe the ability to think, feel, want etc.
But if we are entirely natural processes ourselves then what we think, feel, ascribe value to is the universe doing it. Just in a rather complex way.
And while it cant be extrapolated to other complex processes, part of our natural existence is seeking out those pattens even in the universe - for some it even helps using human experience analogous to complex mechanisms.
QED we should be able to treat the universe like just a lil Buddy of you want to
While the universe is indifferent because it is not conscious, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that there is a pattern to the goals that rational minds that can exist in this universe find attractive.This pattern would be an objective structure to morality and arguably would qualify as an inherent purpose to the universe
It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they'd still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.
Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I'm not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don't think I died, even though there's this huge gap in my mind and the "me" from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn't necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.
Life after death! Neat.
Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.
So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?
So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she's only like ~80% accurate then that's just fine. I'd much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol
So the interesting part in my mind for this is that you would die and be gone, there would just exist another entity that can perfectly replicate you. Take for example the case of there being two of you, which one is the real one? The original? What if I kill the original? Does the new one become the real you? But what if I don't kill you but let the duplicate replace your life. Are you the real you trapped in some cell, or is the duplicate the real you living your life?
My point really is that it's all a matter of perspective. For everyone else the clone would be the real you, but from your perspective you are the real you and the clone stole your life.
Sort of begs the question by assuming there should be one "real you". Why is this a restriction? Why not two real yous?
You an hour from now is every bit you as the you that exists 2 hours from now. They're not identical, but both exist, same space just at different points in time. So why not two "yous", not identical, at the same time just at different points in space?
Because there being two real yous doesn't make sense. Like you can have two identical things but they can not be the same thing, there must be a you #1 and a you #2. Like if I have two water bottles, they are two identical things but they are not the same thing. Changing one of them does not affect the other, thus they are not the same thing.
I'm not saying they're identical, I'm saying they're both "you". That's different.
There are many "you"s already. Consider "you" at different points in time. You recognise it's all the same individual, but they are not identical.
Hence my last sentence. We're comfortable with a variety of non-identical "you"s separated by time. So why not a variety of non-identical "you"s at same time, only separated by space.
Our definition of identity is not tight because it doesn't have to deal with situations like these. We having a working definition something like "the continuous experience of memories, personality and sensation in a body" that serves to help us identify the "you" from yesterday as the same person as the "you" now. They're not identical. What they have in common is a shared continuous physicality.
But if some sci-fi type cloning were possible where two "you"s step out from the one, then both could claim to have a shared continuous physical continuity with the "you" now. And as such both have the same and equal claim on who is the "real" one. As because of that why can't they both be you? Both with separate ongoing experiences. But both "you" in every bit the same way as you claim to be the same "you" as yesterday.
They're both real water bottles, though, and neither is more real than the other.
Yes, my point is that they aren't the same bottle.
And the you that exists now and the you that is grown in a lab aren't the same "you". You're both legitimate versions, though.
I'm not my body and I'm not my mind. I am the ethical soul, the decision-making process. If the replacement makes all the same decisions I would, it IS me.
The thought process assumes it is a complete and perfect cloning of all aspects we do and don't understand. The reason the clone is not you is because if I do something to the clone it does not affect you.
Like if you take a water bottle and clone it, drinking one does not cause the other to be empty. Thus they must be two separate things.
If both the original and the clone are identical, then at that moment they are both me, and neither is more valid than the other. That there's two of me does not invalidate either version. Neither do their divergences going forward.
What if something like ChatGPT is trained on a dataset of your life and uses that to make the same decisions as you? It doesn't have a mind, memories, emotions, or even a phenomenal experience of the world. It's just a large language data set based on your life with algorithms to sort out decisions, it's not even a person.
Is that you?
No, because not all my decisions are language-based. As gotchas go, this one's particularly lazy.
I'm having a hard time imagining a decision that can't be language based.
You come to a fork in the road and choose to go right. Obviously there was no language involved in that decision, but the decision can certainly be expressed with language and so a large language model can make a decision.
But I don't make all my decisions linguistically. A model that did would never act as I do.
It doesn't matter how it comes to make a decision as long as the outcome is the same.
Sorry, this is beside the point. Forget ChatGPT.
What I meant was a set of algorithms that produce the same outputs as your own choices, even though it doesn't involve any thoughts or feelings or experiences. Not a true intelligence, just an NPC that acts exactly like you act. Imagine this thing exists. Are you saying that this is indistinguishable from you?
"Is something that acts exactly like you act indistinguishable from you?"
Well, yes.
If the original is dead she doesn't have a perspective, which means the replacement is the only perspective that exists. As such, she is equally the real me just like I am.
My replacement can have my life if I'm not using it - in fact, I want her to! It'd be a shame if my life went to waste because I was dead.
Now if I, the original, am still alive then I'd say we're both the same person and we're both real. Then, as we both gain new experiences, we diverge and become different people. Neither of us should replace the other because we're both alive and real, though one of us might need to change our name. Even then? We'll flip a coin to see who keeps the original name.
That's an interesting thought experiment.
Well, you just gave me an idea I did not have before.
I'm a simple person. My main philosophy for just about everything is: "if everyone did this, would the world be a better place?"
Things I do, things I say, things I think. I know I won't change the world (much). But I won't make it worse.
You sound like you'd enjoy reading Emmanuel Kant
I hate the state of our world as it is right now. It's been itching inside my head for quite some time alreadu. It probably is somewhat political, because it probably has something to do with capitalism, but I can't understand how a population that has never been so productive still has to work their ass off in order to simply eat and lay in a bed safely. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes and the more I hate how natural it is for seemingly everyone around me.
I'm not one of these people, despite also not being wealthy at all, I have a job, I don't get paid top dollar but I have a safe house, food on the table and I can do a little bit more with my money, and yes, that's it, EVERYTHING seems to revolve around money.
We have a huge amount of resources for very little effort though. Back in the day you could work your ass off in the field all day, but there was no medical technology to cure illness, no vast swaths of entertainment options, no heating to keep you warm (unless you made a fire), and no hamburger that could be delivered to your door with the touch of a button. If you could not starve, lose a toe to frostbite, or die during childbirth, you were doing pretty well.
Right now you've probably never had to deal with hunger - even those under the poverty line can sustain a nutritionally decent diet (albeit an insanely boring one) in the developed world, your life expectancy is somewhere between 75 and 90, the water you drink is clean, there are no soldiers looking to skin you to death, and you're lying on a fluffy mattress stuffing popcorn into your face. If you're an average person, you probably have access to luxuries that were completely inaccessible just a few generations ago, and your working conditions are far better even if you find them boring.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the suffering you might argue exists is preventable. You're not obligated to eat unhealthy foods, watch crummy netflix movies all day, have children (well, unless an old white dude decided otherwise), smoke, etc. The balance of individual choice vs. external influence is debatable, but certainly preferable to having no choice at all.
If you don't directly pay for a product but engage with it, you are still supporting it. You are driving up user metrics, generating ad revenue, creating content for others (videogames, social media). It's complete nonsense to claim you are against something but then continue to use it
This does apply to the current Reddit situation but I formulated this view a while back after quitting Gacha games, people playing those titles looooooove talking about how they would never pay a penny due to the evil monetization but they have no qualms about recruiting friends, writing positive reviews, being content for paying players to lord over, creating guilds etc.
I feel this way about money.
Human cognition/consciousness is not special. There have likely been many now-extinct intelligent species whose evolutionary niche did not encourage the indefinite expansion and subsequent habitat destruction that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, other intelligent species will likely evolve after we are extinct. There is also no reason to believe that consciousness is unique to biological creatures, although mechanical sapience will most likely look very different from ours.
Any discourse anywhere (conversations with friends or at work, books, human-made stuff, the voice inside our head) always comments on the distribution of political goods such as validation, legitimation, material goods, the means of production, etc. Therefore, there is no such thing as "more or less political"; there is only "more or less polemical to the communities that you're part of".
Antinatalism. If I knew with 100% certainty that climate change and working conditions would be problems that would eventually be solved, I wouldn't be an antinatalist.
What is antinatalism? Is that like being child-free?
It's the belief that's it's immoral to create a child. This is a pretty broad definition so even I might disagree with other antinatalists while still being one.
Me being antinatalist is conditional and the condition is if the world is becoming worse for regular people. Others believe humans are evil or are a cancer and while I can sympathize to some degree, I think it's a step too far. XD
Having said that antinatalism and child-free are not mutually exclusive because an antinatalist could adopt a child.
I see, very interesting. I think I can gel with some aspects of antinatalism, like in your example of the world becoming worse for regular people yet still being open to adoption.
You can also ask an adjacent question, which is whether we should attempt to continue to exist as a species. My personal take would be a hard no - I think it would be preferable to seek to end our species within the next few generations - but some would argue that we should attempt to colonize space and maximize our presence.
Why wouldn't this always be true, since we all suffer? How do you determine the max level of expected suffering to make it moral to have kids?
The maximum level is the level at which a) the average sentient being of that generation can be expected to live a net positive life, b) the addition of another does not reduce the positivity of other lives, and c) the individual being itself would live a net positive life. What is considered a net positive is its own question since pleasure exceeding suffering is subjective, but there's a strong argument to be made that there is an increasing net negative, and that's not nearly limited to the climate change argument (in fact that's probably one of the weaker angles one can take).
You can also go sliding scale, though you'd have to compete with the eugenics argument (which is possible), and say that some children are worth bringing into the world and others are not. For example, huge net negatives would be someone who sucks up so many resources that they make the average human life worse or someone whose circumstances make them far more likely to live a qualitatively poor life.
That the only resource a person intrinsically has is time, and that everyone's time is worth the same and invaluable.
If you could play god and either cause a distraction for me (on holiday) or a surgeon at work that lasts an hour, the choice seems obvious. How would you account for that?
That there is absolutely nobody and nothing in this world that wants to do me harm or ruin my day. Stuff happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Nobody is out to get you, everyone has something more important to do.
While mostly true, someone out there always wants to genocide you.
Fair. But I like to think that's less about me and more about them.
Why could "getting you" not be a person's most important to-do item? Would Putin not benefit greatly from getting Zelensky? Would the person up for a promotion not benefit from sabotaging their competition? Would a drug lord not benefit if his competition accidentally slipped and fell and died? There are so many instances in which a person would very logically (not to mention emotionally) benefit from targeting you personally - that's basically the foundation of politics and resource distribution.
Nobody's out to get you personally. They want your shit. Or they want you out of their way on their quest for more shit. Either giving them your shit or getting out of the way will cease you being a perceived threat towards them. In your examples the drug lord/person being promoted isn't targeting their competition personally (as a person), just whomever happens to be the competition. If nobody steps up as a competitor, they have no reason to kill (except as a threat to chill would-be competitors out of the game).
Outside of a few very niche cases of psychotic mental illness, nobody wants to kill. It's so much effort even predators in the wild tend to leave each other alone in favor of prey that won't fight back and maybe kill/injure them. It's why black bears can be scared off and grizzlies/polar bears can't. If you can prove yourself enough of a threat, the animal is going to fuck off to live another day.
First and foremost, treat people like people.
I always liked Bill and Ted's take on it.
Be excellent to each other. And...party on dude.
See we must be excellent to each other first because that is the most important thing. Then we can all party on.
When forced to choose, minimizing harm should always be prioritized over maximizing good. I more mean this in terms of utilitarianism, but even outside of that framework, improving things seems to cause more problems than working towards equity, and once equity is closer it is easier to improve things after.
Consciousness is not material.
Free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.
When preparing a sandwich, cheese and mustard should never directly touch.
Cheese and mustard always go together. Iβm sorry.
Free will is a bullshit term
I hold the opinion that free will is not compatible in a universe with physics. Decisions can be random, but I donβt think the concept of βfree willβ, as every decision comes from the randomness of the universe, and outside factors. Not βconsciousnessβ
How does the fact that point of observation affects the outcome of the experiment fit into this? If there is no consciousness, why does it matter where you observe, as in the case of varying outcomes of the double slit experiment?
The "observer" doesn't have to even be conscious.
I don't believe in determinism or free will, though. The universe is full of random bullshit and nothing matters π
Aren't most philosophers unanimous on this? That the concept of free will can only exist in a world with beings that can act outside the natural world (i.e. god).
Bruh you really gonna use "most" and "unanimous" side-by-side like that?
Lmao good point. Should have said "most philosophers agree'
Consciousness is a side effect of the structures physics has created in our brains. We have consciousness because of the atoms in our brain that interact with each other in different ways.
That doesn't sound like someone who believes nothing matters. This would sound more like it:
dfakjdsnhabfkjdhfjksdabckjadsbnvchievfbiq4rjwiofhewnJSABjaksbjakdbjbdahbDHBHabshbSHbhbHSBABHDBSHDBbhba
If we don't have to kill and abuse others we should not do it just for pleasure.
Probably not all that groundbreaking, but I hadnβt thought of it until recently:
Brutality is a function of societal evolution. The societies that grow and expand do so, not only because of some technological or cultural advancement, but in large part due to their willingness and propensity to conquer and dominate other societies, often in brutal ways.
Peace is hard, in part, because the human desire for power is baked into all the major remaining people and cultures- any society that leans towards peace will eventually be overtaken by one that doesnβt.
Live and let live. Easy as pie.
Truth and falsehood can overlap. In other words, that contradictions can be true. The reason for this is paradoxes like the liar's paradox. The sentence, "this sentence is false," is both true and false at the same time in the same sense. Building on that, mathematics made the wrong choice philosophically when they modified the axioms of set theory instead of changing the logic in which it was embedded and keeping naive comprehension and extensionality
I like this one. Although having spent a lot of my life in digital logic, gates, ones and zeros.... I also hate it.
The best way to get what you want is to provide it to others. It works for love and compassion but itβs also good material advice. If you truly love bread, become a baker and youβll have the most. Even if you just bake bread casually at home and give it to friends, youβll still have bread around all the time.
I'll contribute mine: I'm pro-extinctionism. In basic terms, I think it would be preferable for our species to slowly start to pack up shop.
How is this not overtly political? π
That really is a controversial one. I don't believe this will ever happen on purpose and could never be achieved without forcing other people to comply through violence. I get believing people suck and that the universe would be better off without us, but it is nearly impossible for extinction to be willingly realized. I just donβt like the idea of forcing people like that.
The only place free will source from is quantum randomness.
Also, better believe in free will. If you are wrong, it wasn't really your choice, and if you are right you can do more.
Randomness doesn't give us free will. It gives us chaos. No free will and no fate, just bullshit.
Well, how do you define free will?
I thought about it for quite some time and defined it for myself as following: free will is possibility to make two different choices in identical (down to quantum level and below) set of two universes. That applies only to something that has a "will", which is yet to be defined.
If being in identical circumstances you predictably make identical decisions, that doesn't look like free will to me. Your choice was made by circumstances for you.
So yeah, chaos it is. Nothing bad in it.
There is no such thing as common sense, just logic and stupidity. One can move from one category to the other through trial and error, but don't ever believe that something is "common sense" because your view on something is not the same as someone else.
Common sense is also code for 'something I learned passively through my environment and assume everyone else should have too.'
This is a good one, I've fallen into this trap myself several times. Thinking something's just common sense, only to be disappointed by the person I put my faith in.
Time is likely B-theoretic, not A-theoretic. There is no absolute simultaneity, so the relations between points in time are probably best described in the B-theory.
Substance dualism is a silly conjecture, and neutral monism is just a sad attempt to grant legitimacy to shoddy arguments about mental constructs existing as some kind of concretia. It's dualism in sheep's clothing.
The only thing sillier than substance dualism is substance idealism.
Universals are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nominalism and particularism are better views of what actually exists.
There is no such thing as an essentially ordered series. While they're useful abstracts, in reality all series are accidentally ordered.
Of the four causes, only material and essential usefully describe anything. Formal and final causes are, again, only useful in the abstract.
I could go on, but I doubt anyone's still awake...
No I love this. Fuck dualism, all my homies hate dualism.
Glad it wasn't completely unintelligible to everyone. Any background in philosophy?
Used to be one of my main hobbies, yes.
tbh I would love a longer post that explains all this for normies like me
I'm going to attempt to understand this. Tell me where I'm wrong.
No idea what A or B theory means, but relativity kind of blows a hole in simultaneity, so I assume that B theory has other implications like determinism or something. Something about relationships defining everything.
Chairs only exist in our brains I guess. Brains also invented themselves. Spooky
Plato is silly?
This might have some implications about there not being underlying rules to reality, or that we can never really get anything more than a shadow of them.
Not sure about this one. It might be more epistemological than metaphysical.
The creation and end of existence aren't as important as the rules and the observable state of things?
I could google these things, but I had fun doing it this way.
Solid! I'm going to put together a broader and more detailed comment that should clarify some things, but if you're a newbie to philosophy, you did a pretty darn good job.
We aren't special. Conciousness is a side effect of having so many neurons shaped by millions of years of social and environmental darwinism. We are actually barely concious to avoid confronting the fact that we are just walking meat.
If human head transplants were done, we would have proof that the soul is just a sophisticated algorithm held within our meat, but even then, our barely concious state will refuse to compute the actual implications.
Further our "singular conscious" is an illusion. People with various types of physical brain damage have had their awareness "split" and had something akin to two different consciouses in their brain. Even for "normal" people there are independent processes running in our brain. Our consciousness is in charge sort of the way the teacher is in charge of the nursey school. It might decide when recess is but it can't stop that one kid from just singing for no reason.
Also to your point I think that if we could transplant a head we'd find that our sentience involves more than the brain. I think we underestimate how connected all of our systems are.
Panpsychism has merit.
Yeah, I don't know that it solves much, but it's rather tidy to take the one think we know exists (consciousness) and fit it into a fundamental question (what makes up the universe).
I have a saying, if the people no longer respect the government rules, shall the state end up in anarchy.
There's no such thing as free will
I'm not sure that it matters
Not really I suppose
My trial is ending soon, should I upgrade to the paid version?
Yeah I'd recommend it
βConsciousnessβ is not a multitude instances of which you have one of, itβs something singular that has you.
We are all the same weird mirror rippling through space-time trying to figure out how to outfox entropy.
I've always thought that what makes me the most happy is trying not to care about material things. Just stuff I make myself is what I care about most. I made my own music player app and it's garbage compared to everything else available but I still love it. I feel like this is a pretty popular opinion to hold though.
What is your music player app?
"Free will", as almost anyone defines it, is completely indistinguishable from no free will.
Also: The universe exists as a manifestation of pure math. In the same sense that the answer to "What is 9827349328659327498327592432^98374239563298473298324253?" exists even if nobody bothers to actually calculate it, the answer to "What does a universe with [these] parameters look like at t = 13.7 billion years look like?" exists as well - and it looks like you. A lot of people agree that it might be in principle possible to simulate the universe - even if it requires something silly like a computer larger than the universe. I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
My hunch (and this is just a hunch) is that in some cases this might be true but not in the general case. The universe contains turning machines. So one cannot arbitrarily determine a future state without also disproving the Halting Problem.
I'm not sure if you quoted the right portion of my message - but I don't think the halting problem plays any part in this scenario. It's perfectly possible to simulate a computer running a program with an unknown halting state - there's no real need to know if or when a nested program will halt to simulate it anyways. The arbitrary future state you want to determine may just have it in a non-halted state. The simulation itself is likely non-halting.
I want to clarify that I say "simulation", but I don't mean it in the sense it's usually used at all - I think our universe is as real as real gets. I think of it like this xkcd. If you accept that the universe can in principle be simulated (Such that you, as an inhabitant of the universe, would notice no difference), then why not accept that it can be so simulated with rocks? And if you can accept that your entire existence and subjective experience is determined by rock placement in a desert - then why require the rocks at all? To me, the fact that the universe is mathematically consistent is then enough for it to exist - at least as far as it and its inhabitants are concerned.
I will admit that non-determinism from quantum randomness makes this all a bit hairier / fuzzier, but I don't think it invalidates the whole thing at all.
Hard determinism. Everything is a number and has already happened. Also, one electron universe.
Apple and Android both need to exist. Apple isn't your friend and market privacy to take a market and when they have it they will shit on it. Google doesn't care about your privacy but are at least working on doing better and are trying to unite platforms.
Don't put your eggs in one basket.
This too shall pass. Enjoy what you can, but don't get attached to it. You can even become deeply involved in something or with someone, but always be emotionally and mentally prepared for the day when it or they are no more. Expect it.
I think calling anything I think or hold to possibly be true a "belief" is not quite accurate. I don't really have faith or anything like that. I believe things that can be proven to be real, and I have ideas that may count as philosophy but without a belief that it is correct or not. Like, I think it's entirely possible for an afterlife of some such to exist. If matter and energy can not be destroyed, only transformed, and our consciousness is a form of energy, then maybe we still retain consciousness after death on a different level of existence which could be attributed to Heaven or Hell or any other religious idea of an afterlife. On the other side of the same possibility, I don't think a God is possible. God is either simply a convenient name for the randomness of the universe, or was an alien race not much different than us, but way, way more advanced technologically.
Is that really philosophical, though?
Optimistic nihilism has always been a favorite. While there may be a purpose to existence, there is no concrete evidence of it. But if indeed life has no meaning, that's not a big deal, because humans are creative and can create our own.
I don't believe in free will meaning that what ever you did you could not have done otherwise. We live in a deterministic universe and all events are part of a causal chain
What difference does it make?
Less judgement for other people mostly. Feeling hate towards someone is almost impossible for me. It's a nonsensical emotion which implies that they could be otherwise. I still dislike some people and don't want to be around them but I don't blame them for it.
But if judgement also works in a purely deterministic way then it has a role to play. One doesn't have to have agency (free will) in order for the negative experience of judgement to result in improved behaviour. Rational judgement discerns whether or not the punishment will reasonably bring about an improvement. As it does in many cases then it doesn't matter that the world's deterministic, good judgement can make it better.
(E.g. it might not be someone's "fault" that they're a mass murderer, but society is still taking the right course of action by denouncing their beliefs and restricting their freedom)
Yeah I agree that no free will doesn't mean we can't affect our own or other people's behaviour. Punishment itself doesn't make any sense but the fear of punishment does deter bad behaviour and yeah obviously mass murderers needs to be locked up. Not as a punishment but to protect others
I more feel sadness that they weren't given the tools to be different and endeavor to provide those tools for people like them in the future.
Optimistic Nihilism.
Consciousness is an accident, the universe is an emergent property of physical laws, and there is no purpose to any of it; no gods, no guiding intention, no natural morality, no afterlife. Just entropy.
This is a good, positive thing to understand.
If there is no intrinsic morality, then we are free to define morality for ourselves. This is a burden, but it something that we can recognise and think critically about, rather than just taking whatever tradition we were raised in, and picking and choosing as is convenient.
If there is no afterlife, then every act of alturism, every kind thing we do we can do because we want to. Not because we are afraid of damnation, but because we decided that it was the right thing to do.
If we leave nothing behind but dust, then we must be aware of the impact we have now, because our time is limited and brief.
If we are a random collection of atoms, a brief coherent pattern among the chaos, then we can recognise that every single other person is the fundamentally the same.
Treat others how you would like to be treated. Adress others the way you want to be adressed.
I used to subscribe to that, but I've since modified it for myself.
"Treat others as they ask to be treated. Default to treating them as I would like to be treated. Address others as they ask to be addressed."
The philosophical position I hold is that solipsism isn't true. Because to ask yourself if others exist requires language, which we all learn from other people. We can doubt our senses without language, but this is psychosis, not philosophy.
And I think most Western people haven't really solved the question of solipsism and still live in the Cartesian theater. And that this is a major reason why we're mindlessly killing the planet (and ourselves).
How do you even know which things are part of the self and which are 'external'? That feels arbitrary or a 'I know it when I see it' to me.
You could say the self is things you control but under any scrutiny in almost any domain that's not true for what we think of as 'self' either.
I agree solipsism isn't true, but I don't know that I agree you couldn't doubt the external world without language. I think language is just the mechanism we use to describe our inner thoughts. Math is 'real' and describes the world whether you use base 10 or 12 or don't know about math at all.
Well self other is a false dichotomy ultimately. This is what the Buddha means by no self.
Language is how we form concepts, like self amd other. Without these concepts the question of solipsism can not arise.
And language is about communication. Moving information between two points. It presupposes these two positions. And thus falsifies solipsism.
then why does language occur internally and create new things, like you say, if its only function is about moving information:
Because the brain is made up of individual cells moving information around.
How could you convince a solipsist of that? It seems impossible to disprove the position "I am imagining that anything outside my consciousness is real". Anything you cite as evidence is premised on the conclusion.
Language is how we create our stories. The story is "I am imagining that anything outside my consciousness is real."
Without language the story cannot be formulated. But language presupposes an other. It exists to pass information. So the fact that we have language disproves solipsism.
This isn't my argument btw. It's Wittgenstein's argument against Decartes "I think therefore I am". Which was flawed anyway because he still believed in God and the Devil, so two others in Decartes solipsism.
Anyway, it's a hard argument to break because solipsism is so imbedded in Western thinking. I had to drop LSD to break through it and get what Wittgenstein was saying.
The hard solipsist would disagree with you already from the 4th word. Your assuming an other to try to convince someone of their existence.
Here are a few theoretical realities:
The perceived existence of language is compatible with all of these, is it not?
I think there's a difference between solipsism and being skeptical about what your senses are experiencing.
For example, there's an other in the Matrix. It's not a form of Solipsism but a form of prison. Ditto for the brain in a vat. Not sure if that's the brain hypothesis.
Also, me being asleep and dreaming all of this doesn't disprove that others exist. Just that we can't prove that the people we're interacting with currently aren't dream characters. Language still proves that somethone else is out there. Otherwise we imagined the whole thing and imagination is ultimately derivative regardless of what we tell ourselves.
The brain in the vat and matrix also fall into this. Someone else (an other) put you in the box to fool your senses (Descartes made this same fallacy assuming the devil maybe tricking his senses, which is silly to draw the conclusion that the fact you think proves you exist since the devil could surely change your thoughts if he could change everything else you experience).
Not sure what your last example is but I assume it's similar to the other three in essence. If not please let me know and I'll check it out.
And again, not my argument btw, I'm not this smart. It's Wittgenstein's and it was hard to grok at first due to social conditioning. But he's widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the last generation partially because of his debunking solipsism.
Humanity is living in an (almost) endless painful cycle of civilisations rising, prospering and falling, like a phoenix rising from its ashes, only to burn again. No civilisation, nation, or idea can escape. Some might be able to avoid destruction for longer than others, but they will eventually meet their end.
Death is and should be inevitable, and it's a good thing. I have gotten over the fear of dying when I was eight, yet so many people, (way too many of them are adults) seem to treat death as a sensitive and even taboo topic.
I find the thought that I'll most likely be able to rest peacefully either in a state of non-existence or some sort of afterlife to be calming. I tend to think that the acknowledgment of our own mortality is the only thing that makes us truly enjoy life, as we know it won't last forever. This is the reason why people talking about technology that could make immortal people without thinking about the downsides enough really concerns me. Humans are supposed to be born, to live and to die.
If we want to define whether an action is immoral or moral, then as a rule of thumb, it is moral as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. (yes, this includes non-human animals) There are a lot of exceptions of course.
Humans are not superior to other animals. The reason I think that, in general, killing another human is worse than killing another animal is not that human lives matter more than lives of other animals, but instead that you shouldn't kill your own species.
About #3, do you view this as a hard rule? Not the animal part (vegan btw), the "hurting is always wrong" part. There are situation where I've caused harm to someone for the sake of others, their future, or a greater pleasure.
Also interested in the "not killing you own species" section of #4. I would also kill another animal rather than a human, but for other reasons. What do you think about hurting a member of your own species is uniquely bad?
It is not really a hard rule, I think there are a lot of situations where you have to hurt someone such as self-defense, having to eat other animals to survive and such. So it's like a soft rule of thumb, as there are a lot of situations where hurting someone is justified.
And concerning killing your own species versus other animals, I think we naturally tend to have more empathy for other people and especially the ones closer to us. Also killing a non-human animal outside of self-defense can be justified by needing food, but, well, eating another human seems to be worse than eating a cow.
I think as renewable energy gets cheaper and we move away from scarcity in society, we will stop looking at ourselves as brands. Instead, personal conduct, or the appearance of such will play a much larger part in our public lives and place in society. This will provide a lot of privacy issues.
Liberty is the most imprtant thing.
Pre-crime should never be punished, only actual crime.
Gun rights are human rights.
Question porn featuring fictional people (drawn or written) should not be legislated.
lol