In an RBE the idea is to automate or industrialize all repetitive production/work. — Josh Alfred

Yes, as you suggest, this is already happening technically, the problem is that such automated systems are still owned by a nefarious few.

Having an UBI I think would be a nice and almost dogged transition to an RBE. — Josh Alfred

:clap: But how do you marry this viewpoint with your profile statement:
Politically, I am most immediately a social-capitalist. I accept free market competition while pointedly accepting that there need to be regulations over wealth, and investments of the federal banking system into things like infrastructure. See: Mixed Economics.

If you advocate for a resource based economy then would you still suggest that only a few rich should own the automated infrastructure? Can you offer some regulation idea's you would impose on wealth and investment.

Not exactly 'your strongest condemnation towards them' or a reason why you want to be one of them. You also suggest 'I seem to be grumbling,' in a way that in my opinion attempts to trivialise my complaints against the nefarious rich. As I typed, you appear to be a person who works within the bounds of reasoned thought but yet you would choose to be one of the rich. Under the law of the jungle rules, do you want to be one of the lions in charge of the entire pride? Would you like the fate of all the other male lions to be under your whim and tolerance? Would you like access to any lioness in the pride? Is that your driver under all that reasonable typing?
It's ok :joke: you don't need to answer that! I am only really typing about all people who are wannabee's
I will type about me rather than focus too much about my (probably inaccurate) impressions of you.
I don't want to be rich but I would like to have the power to stop anyone from becoming too rich and too powerful, including me. Rather paradoxical on the power issue I suppose. to become so powerful that I can prevent anyone including myself from becoming omnipotent.

First of all, gracias for attempting to make me see the light. I feel capitalism is all about competition and it models evolution in my humble opinion. — Agent Smith

For me, your response might seem very reasonable to many. The rich are indeed a product of the 'law of the jungle rules' and this is one of the main reasons why the majority of the worlds population continue to suffer under that exact uncivilised, savage law. It's a bad law which can, should and must be broken and destroyed. My only argument with you is that you present this law as an excuse for the behaviour of the rich instead of using it to condemn them for living by jungle instincts rather than by a sense of human civilised justice. In the USA does the words "all men are created equal" (as part of a sentence in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 at the beginning of the American Revolution) not gnaw against the 'law of the jungle' approach applied by the American rich?
The fact that they do not care that it does deserves your strongest condemnation towards them, does it not? So why do you want to be one of them? Are you sure you want to be rich? Are you sure you would not be content with an economic status that meant you could take the basic means of survival for granted from cradle to grave?

Bill Gates' donations should be treated and appreciated as charity. No where does capitalism say that once you become wealthy, you have social responsibilities and this is implied in our (all of us) deal with capitalism. In my estimation everyone agrees on this point. — Agent Smith

Did the money trick example not exemplify for you that the status, power and wealth of the rich is gained by their sycophantic manipulation of the labour of the majority poor?
Bill Gates so called 'charity work,' is explained by:

When Owen allows them a crumb of ‘charity’ they glorify his kindness and generosity. — universeness

If he is a genuine philantrophist ln the way I think Joseph Rowntree or Paul Newman was, then fine, to me, that's the absolute least they could do and this should be expected and not praised because to do otherwise would make them vile.
I am more interested in what you would do in his position but you seem reluctant to answer, so I am at a loss as to why you seem to covet being rich so much. I know you enjoy playing the stealth game and if you wont engage in discussion of how you would 'be' as a rich man in today's world, then we have very little to build upon. I think there are many many people who are not economically rich but have experienced lives as happy, useful, fulfilled and significant as any rich or rich and famous person ever has, in all of time.

I thinks its just an accident that the super-rich are, sometimes, a**holes! :snicker: — Agent Smith

I think it comes with the territory and I would never compare the rich (especially the super rich) to ar**holes as that particular system is a very vital and effective waste disposal system. The rich are a waste that certainly requires some kind of effective disposal short of physical termination.

What would you do if you were as rich as Bill Gates?
Let's say you have made sure everyone you care about has been made economically secure.
You have spent a few years sating your private fantasies.
You can buy a rolls royce in the same way as I can buy a small packet of peanuts, so for you, purchasing a Rolls Royce or sleeping with a beautiful woman etc is very trivial.
How would you spend your time and what would your purpose be?

Hopefully we can still get a good discussion. Money is an interesting phenomenon in our society. — ssu

Could it, really? If nobody would work and do anything, likely then we'd die quite quickly — ssu

I thought we could possibly refocus the thread onto a discussion on the money trick and UBI.

Do you really think that something like UBI would mean that most people would choose not to work or take part in activities which would help the society they live in and benefit from?

My local scheme: https://gov.wales/wales-pilots-basic-income-scheme — unenlightened

Yeah I am familiar with the Welsh trial. What a good beginning for those young people just coming out of the care system.

On today's standards we're forced to work to sustain ourselves, even though our society could provide for you if they deem you beneficial enough for them to provide such assistance.
— Yozhura
Could it, really? If nobody would work and do anything, likely then we'd die quite quickly. — ssu

I don't think Yozhura can answer you as according to their profile info, they have been banned.

I so hope your viewpoint in this area reaches 'vast majority' status asap.
It would be such an enormous step forwards in creating a positive human life experience imo.
I agree that it UBI will not be completely problem free but it would change much more for the better than it would for the worse in my opinion.

Fair enough:
What do you think of the following, based on the concept of the money trick:
Owen starts to play a game…
Owen represents the capitalist class – so he claims the bread, the pennies and the knives all belong to him. He casts his friends as the working class, and generously employs them to use the knives to turn the bread into little squares, to represent “the necessities of life”. He pays them a penny each for a week’s work, which is to produce three little squares.
The workers are hungry. They each buy one square from Owen, with the penny they earned. They eat the bread, and finish the week with nothing. Owen ends the week with the pennies, and more bread squares than he can eat. This is repeated, until Owen decides to take the pocketknives back and close down production, blaming ‘foreigners’ for the situation.
And just like that the ‘working class’ become destitute. They are stuck – so they try marching, then begging. When Owen allows them a crumb of ‘charity’ they glorify his kindness and generosity.

Do you think money or its like as the main means of controlling exchange cannot be improved upon?

:vomit:

Just a question of interest on my part. Are you for or against the idea of a UBI (universal basic income) for all as being trialed in a few projects now.

Money is anything that we value and yep, we're slaves to anything we value. — Agent Smith

Do you value the lives of others or do you mean 'value' as in what you can exchange for it?

Better if you try to learn than merely echo.

I think, because I can and I do, that your comment is intellectually sterile, but I'm convinced it has been emotionally rewarding for you as this one is for me. — Raul

How you get your jollies is a matter for you. Don't imagine that I receive emotional rewards in the same ways you do. You again demonstrate your sterile thinking.

I mean futuristic scenarios that is to say pure sterile speculation. — Raul

Your use of the word sterile is just your baseless (imo) opinion. If you go back 50 years ago in the UK or even most of the USA and someone suggested a 'futuristic scenario,' in which same sex marriage is legalised. Would you have called such a prediction 'sterile speculation?' If so, you would now have been proven dead wrong.

I would not go to futuristic scenarios at the moment as that is quite sterile thinking — Raul

Think about the future or risk being defined completely by the past. Sterile thinking is NOT thinking about the future.

All systems change in time. What will 'marriage' mean 10,000 years from now?
Will future transhumans marry? How much can you be cybernetic and still get married with full legal protections? Do you have to have a minimum organic content, such as a human brain? Perhaps in the future, every other part can be replaced by cybernetic system that look and function in the exact same way the flesh did but is a lot more robust and lasts a lot longer.
Will gender even make any sense for such transhumans?

Good morning Athena. So you are a veteran fighter from a family of veteran fighters and you gained that very admirable title without killing people in a foreign land. An excellent legacy imo. I would like to read that book about you and your family and all the battles you fought for the economically and socially oppressed. Has that book been written and if not why not and why don't you write it. All you need to do is describe all the events that happened, someone else could record into a computer. I would buy that book, it sounds very interesting.

OMG, yes, living to see Trump jailed may qualify as something worth living for. A change in my family would be super, not just for me but the children. — Athena

Two hits in my first attempt is not bad.
What about seeing Putin fall after Russia experiences a Vietnam type defeat against Ukraine?

What about meeting a child in a store or on the street who fires one of those smiles at you which is just indescribable in its sublime honesty and innocence?

but I am not living for my family beyond my ability to be independent. — Athena

Independence is very important I agree but you are not done yet.
I was not as down in the trenches in quite the same way as you or as often as you.
I was a political activist from an early age and marched/canvased for socialist causes.
I was most active on the union front and was involved in a fair number of industrial disputes and fights for workers rights. I was even a union shop steward for a time.
My 85 year old mother who lives with me has terminal breast cancer, she will not accept treatment but will continue until her last breath. She has always been a very strong woman. I have good sibling support.

Oh, have you seen the movie, Harold and Maude? Maude kills herself on her 80th birthday. — Athena

No but the actress who played Maude was still alive at the end of the film i'd bet!
I like the music of Cat Stevens and I like the actress Ruth Gordon (On August 28, 1985, Ruth Gordon died at her summer home in Edgartown, Massachusetts, following a stroke at age 88. Her husband for 43 years, Garson Kanin, was at her side and said that even her last day of life was typically full, with walks, talks, errands, and a morning of work on a new play.)
I most liked Ruth Gordon as the mother of Philo Beddoe in the 'Every which way but loose' and 'Any which way you can,' Clint Eastwood movies.

Perhaps there are still some movies you need to see Athena.
Some good things you still have to witness.
I have always liked many of the lines in the song below:

God, in his infinite wisdom and goodness, could have arranged for less bloody ways of humans acting on their free will. But he didn't — baker

Well, it couldn't, if it has no and never has experienced existence.

G'day is an Australian greeting. Australia is often called OZ, hence my use of 'OZ speak.' Bonza is another Australian slang word used to exclaim that something is good.
Banzai was just something Japanese soldiers shouted when charging allied soldiers during WW2.
They were fanatical charges where the Japanese mostly got slaughtered in large numbers. Sometimes it was their final charge rather than surrender. Google says that in Japanese, the literal translation is '10 thousand years.'

You are wrong — javi2541997

I know I cant change you mind regarding the Banzai charge but would you agree that it is not highly respected or valued with military strategists. I have read a couple of books written by those involved in the hell of war, such as one I have just completed, The personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Even in those days of facing only musket fire and early cannon fire (in comparison with the much more lethal weapons of WW 2). The bayonet charge was mostly unsuccessful.
Look at the disaster of 'Pickets charge' at Gettysburg! The rebel yell was equally and probably more impressive (imo) than screaming a word like banzai, which is not much better than the traditional 'CHARGE!' Anyway I digress again so I shall type no more on the topic in this thread.

G'day. — Agent Smith

I like Oz speak. I definitely prefer "Bonza!" to the fanatical Japanese scream of "Banzai," during there infamous futile bayonet charges in WW 2. I think most of them got shot. The Banzai charge was a rather unsuccessful war strategy. (sorry @javi2541997)

This, some would say, is building castles in the air, a mere pipe dream. I'm an optimist though so, yeah! — Agent Smith

I understand this apathy, when facing tasks/changes which seem insurmountable BUT, an old comparator is what kind of general responses do you think you would have got from people if you lived 500 years ago and you looked up at the moon and said 'one day, I think men will walk on the surface of the moon?'

Addition: Maybe we were just born too soon to benefit from such needed change. It took 2022 years to get from the short, even more traumatic human life experience of the days in which the Christian fables are set, to the 'improved' state we are now in for most humans today. I think we need at least the same duration again, perhaps much, much more. Just a few more seconds in the cosmic calendar.

Wise words. Who will watch over my family after I'm gone? — Agent Smith

The humans who are still here. Once they have got their act together of course. Until then, your concerns are justified but we will get there a lot quicker if we get rid of money, private land ownership, exclusive governmental control over military, countries, theistic influence over politics and/or politicians etc, etc.
The fact that the list is still quite long shows how much there is to do. Maybe the anti-life people could get off their misanthropic butts and help out a little more. That would help!

I don't deny that conceptions of god are easy to implode with carefully placed critiques. I simply acknowledge that there is conceptual room for god, especially given my low wattage beam on reality. I simply chose order as the essence of god as it encompasses most of the conventional understandings in social, symbolic, and moral systems. — introbert

You have the freedom to engage in this kind of personal conceptualisation. To me, it seems that you are just employing a 'god of the gaps' approach. If we don't fully understand the how and why something works or/and exists then some people have a need to throw god posits at it. There is as much 'conceptual room' for pixies as there is for god. Both posits seem to be equal in plausibility (or lack of) and evidence (or lack of). I think this tendency is probably part of 'the essence' of being human as opposed to the essence of any god. Many humans simply cannot handle the status of 'unknown,' it seems to constantly niggle and frustrate and something like god is used as a small misshaped sticking plaster over a gaping hole in our knowledge.
For many people this seems to offer some relief from constantly niggling frustrations. I could deal with that on a person to person basis but when organised religion tries to preach god fables as irrefutable truth and dares to spout threats towards nonbelievers and actually tries to influence social and political policy with theistic guidance, then they have stepped way over the line and must be pushed back behind that line.

You can manage without god, if you are willing to take all the responsibility yourself. — unenlightened

This is correct but I would go further, getting rid of god as a scapegoat (which is its main utility by humans) would help humans face their responsibilities.
I was watching a news story about a holocaust survivor who had decided to speak about her experience to young people on-line. The interviewer asked her how she dealt with thoughts of 'god' when thinking about what she went through. She said that Yom Kippur was coming up and she had great difficulty with the part that asks participants to ask god for forgiveness for sins. She said she keeps thinking that god should ask for her forgiveness. I think this is wrong. All humans, Germans, Japanese, British, Ancient Romans and Greeks, etc have treated other humans just like some Germans treated Jews, Gypsies etc or how some Japanese treated prisoners of war, or even how some union or confederates treated prisoners during their civil war. There are such guilty people in all era's of history and in every country.
NONE OF IT WAS DOWN TO GOD(s)! It was all down to our behaviour! The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem!

But surely the evidence from science suggests the Universe is chaos - order -chaos.
So does the god you perceive exists in chaos as well as order?

The big question for me is why is it that god/s are never known directly? All we have is people telling stories, or old books that say a thing. No god has ever shows up, except in the stories. Highly suspicious, don't you think. :fire: - And no, that's not a burning bush. — Tom Storm

These are some of the reasons why I am an atheist Tom!

The Bible has a long tradition of being understood as allegory. I think the hallmark of prominent contemporary Christianity, and the reversion into Protestant primitivism, is Biblical inerrancy, which is a kind of hermeneutical throwback, like the Taliban. — Tom Storm

That's one of the politest ways of saying 'if you take the bible as literal truth then you are rather backwards, a bit like the Taliban,' that I have read. You should get extra moderator points for that!

But Christians do say God has written the moral code in our hearts. — Art48

What happens during heart transplants? Is the code the same in every heart, what about the future of heart replacement such as described below:

Patients with late stage heart failure may be able to receive a heart transplant, in which the heart from a deceased donor is used to replace their diseased heart. Unfortunately, the demand for new hearts greatly outweighs the number of hearts available for transplantation. This is why we need synthetic hearts that are able to permanently replace a diseased heart. This technology is still being developed, but it is hoped by many that such devices will one day become available.

The first artificial heart transplant took place in 1969. The device, developed by Texas Heart Institute founder Dr. Domingo Liotta, was implanted in a 47-year-old patient with severe heart failure, allowing them to live for nearly three days until a human heart became available. Current synthetic hearts are made from titanium and/or plastic, which can be made from biocompatible materials, meaning that it is chemically inert and is less likely to be rejected by the body’s immune system. This is an advantage over a real human heart transplant, in which the recipient’s immune system must be suppressed in order to avoid transplant rejection. Unfortunately, this is where the advantages of a synthetic heart end.

What do the Christians think of this man in 1969 and his organic morally void heartless 3 days and how come hearts can be rejected if they have gods code written on them what stupid games is this god playing?

Why stop there? A god could surely just implant complete knowledge in all human minds, without the need for any long-form narrative. :wink: — Tom Storm

Yep, I have often wondered why humans have to learn how to speak, read, write etc and LEARN about god posits. How come we don't know about god from birth?
Did god teach Adam these things or did he just have such knowledge from when he was made?
Could Adam speak to Eve as soon as he was created? then why cant we? or is that Eve and Lilith's fault as well?

I found this conception of the extra dimensions proposed in string theory, 'graspable.' Its from the physics stack exchange.

Take an 2D antlike entity on a 2D surface, it is like an ant but it has only two dimensions moving within the (x,y) plane. One can pile up an infinity of (x,y) planes with 2D ants on each 2D surface when a z direction is hypothesized by an Einstein of an ant.

In this example the ant could disappear from its plane, with a perpendicular motion and appear on other planes in this z direction. (3rd dimension)

If we hypothesize a fourth space dimension for our three dimensional universe , we could disappear into the perpendicular direction into another three dimensional volume.

There will be a certain amount to the "left," a certain amount "high," and a certain amount front or backward (etc). It's still length, width and depth.

The example of a two dimensional ant should make you understand that different surfaces should exist when adding the third dimension. For the three to four dimensions it is different volumes. And also funny shapes, part within our volume and part outside, As a 3D entity, it would really be confusing for us.

String theories need extra dimensions so as to be able to embed the standard model of particle physics into the vibrations of the strings. The standard model is an encapsulation of practically all the data we have for the quantum mechanical framework of particle physics.

As people do not in reality disappear into other extra dimensional volumes, theorists needed to make the extra dimensions very tiny, to agree with the experimental fact that only in fairy tales people disappear and reappear. The compactified curled up extra dimensions still fulfill the need for embedding the standard model, and also the fact that no extra dimensions have been observed in all our particle experiments either.

In the example of the ant, if one compactified the third, z, dimension, there would be no danger of it sliding around surfaces not existing in its original world, because it could not fit into the curled dimension.

Surely any technically competent god could make a personal appearance in front of all of us at the same time and tell us its story in every language required, including sign language for the deaf and street speak for da kool kidz! Surely it would also have some explaining to do to at least the dolphins, chimps, and ape's etc. Hollywood's (Bruce/Evan almighty)suggestion of god depicted as Morgan Freeman would work for me.

A scripture? in these modern electronic times!

That is the one I will choose. Except it would really suck if death were not much different from life. I have read that if we are stuck in a bad place in our lives, it is much easier to get through that and move on to a good place in this three-dimensional reality. In the next realm, it takes much longer to pass through a bad spot. I think it is pretty important to have our heads in a good space when we cross over. — Athena

Your head will be in a good place when you cross over, I guarantee it! But live out your life in full.
How about TPF member @Ken Edwards in his 90's, can hardly walk but still has an attitude of 'no surrender?'

I have always believed our elders are valuable people, but when we can not take care of ourselves and be useful perhaps it is our duty to leave life to the young? Do you realize an increasing number of homeless people are elderly people and they are at a higher risk of dying on the streets than the young? For sure I would rather be dead than be one of them and the way rents are going up, I could be one of them. — Athena

I am not sure you would settle for such a situation Athena. We all need help to care for ourselves sometimes. Have you not cared for many others in your life, would it be so wrong to expect a little care in return? When I imagine myself homeless and on the streets, especially if I cant figure that it was completely my fault then I think my sense of injustice would kick in. I would try to organise my fellow homeless and move into or protest in a local theistic building (church, chapel, mosque, temple, cathedral etc) or I would try to occupy my local town hall or live/die outside the door of my local MP etc.
I would make as much of a political nuisance of myself as I could, to call for better protection of the elderly. I would die happier knowing that I lived true to myself until my last breath.

I can not imagine anything really cool happening that I would want to stay around for. — Athena

A change in family circumstances that improve things? One family member making the effort to talk to you about the current family situation in a constructive way?
A cure for Alzheimer's?
A visit from aliens?
Donald Trump getting jailed?
A comedy show on TV which makes you laugh more than you have ever laughed in your life?
Deciding that you will finish and publish your book despite the difficulties?

I was watching Sean Carroll's monthly podcast 'ask me anything september' and he was answering a question about 'Constructor theory.' I had not heard of it and looked it up on wiki:
As I read it, this thread came to mind and I wondered if constructor theory could be used to assess the plausibility of an omniscient system by means of a possible or impossible 'task' as this concept is employed in constructor theory. I have copied and pasted the couple of paragraphs below from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory which made me think of this thread:

The fundamental elements of the theory are tasks: the abstract specifications of transformations as input–output pairs of attributes. A task is impossible if there is a law of physics that forbids its being performed with arbitrarily high accuracy, and possible otherwise. When it is possible, a constructor for it can be built, again with arbitrary accuracy and reliability. A constructor is an entity that can cause the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again. Examples of constructors include a heat engine (a thermodynamic constructor), a catalyst (a chemical constructor) or a computer program controlling an automated factory (an example of a programmable constructor).
The theory was developed by physicists David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto. It draws together ideas from diverse areas, including thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, information theory, and quantum computation.
Quantum mechanics and all other physical theories are claimed to be subsidiary theories, and quantum information becomes a special case of superinformation.
Chiara Marletto's constructor theory of life builds on constructor theory.

and

According to Deutsch, current theories of physics, based on quantum mechanics, do not adequately explain why some transformations between states of being are possible and some are not. For example, a drop of dye can dissolve in water, but thermodynamics shows that the reverse transformation, of the dye clumping back together, is effectively impossible. We do not know at a quantum level why this should be so. Constructor theory provides an explanatory framework built on the transformations themselves, rather than the components.

Information has the property that a given statement might have said something else, and one of these alternatives would not be true. The untrue alternative is said to be "counterfactual". Conventional physical theories do not model such counterfactuals. However, the link between information and such physical ideas as the entropy in a thermodynamic system is so strong that they are sometimes identified. For example, the area of a black hole's event horizon is a measure both of the hole's entropy and of the information that it contains, as per the Bekenstein bound. Constructor theory is an attempt to bridge this gap, providing a physical model that can express counterfactuals, thus allowing the laws of information and computation to be viewed as laws of physics.

Do you think this has any relevance to your OP? I admit my thought that constructor theory may be a way to assess the plausibility of an omniscient system is based on very tenuous linking on my part as I am basing it on a loose reading of a theory I had not heard of before today.

:blush:

Alright, imagine this scenario: You get wind of a suicide in your neighborhood. The person, a Mr. X, has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It piques your interest, because from what you know - X is wealthy, no drug/alcohol issues, doctors report he has no chronic illnesses, X's been married for 10 years now to a loving wife and has 3 adorable children, and so on - X was the last person who you'd have thought would take his own life. X's suicide makes no sense at all. Have I not given a description, albeit sketchy, of many cases of deaths classified as suicide? — Agent Smith

Sounds a reasonable scenario. I would suggest the following possibilities.
1. He was (unknown to his friends and family) part of a sect whose leader decided that the only way to enter the REAL world was to kill yourself after taking this little red pill. This truth will not come out for another 70 years due to the official secrets act as the guy was a well known politician and involved with MI6.

2. He was 'hypnotised' by an enemy and compelled to kill himself.

3. He did not kill himself and was in fact killed by his unfaithful wife in a plot to gain his assets and share them with her secret toyboy. (His wife did seem loving BUT......)

4. He became obsessed with the suffering he saw in life. His gentle persona could not handle it any more. He exchanged with all the anti-life people on TPF. He focussed too much on schoppin in the same places and became too weak to continue to choose life. So he self-inflicted his own death as a pointless gesture to the anti-life posit of 'the futility of life.'

5. He was always curious or impatient to find out if heaven and hell really existed. He had prayed and prayed to his god and in a dream, he received (perfectly rational in his opinion) permission from his god (no suicide exclusion clause) to come join his god now and enjoy the heavenly paradise as he had done enough in his life lived so far to qualify under well established god criteria.

6. He was really fed up that everyone called him Mr X, just cause he was bald and looked like Patrick Stewart. (Sorry Mr Smith, I couldn't resist!)

Are all these suggestions impossible or just unlikely?

I am sure Sherlock will figure it out!