That is awesome. Maybe if that actually happens and works well they can serve as a model for police reform around the country.

I was having an existential crisis last year. I got over it back then.

Now I read a bit of this Information Philosopher and saw that he had a similar thought to one that helped me get over it. (Namely, heat death isn't inevitable because of the expansion of the universe). I wondered if anyone knew where elaboration upon that thought of his could be found on his site.

This isn't about existential crises or physicalism or anything like that in general. I just wanted to know about this particular philosopher, and then find more of his thoughts on a particular topic. If you don't want to talk about that, then this isn't the thread for it.

Well I guess this isn’t the thread for you then cause that’s the topic.

I don’t want this thread to become an argument about physicalism, but no, physicalism doesn’t entail that things necessarily have to decay. That depends entirely on what the laws of physics are, and both I and apparently this Information Philosopher think the ones we currently think obtain permit physical things in principle to go on forever, with it just being a technical matter to accomplish that, the likes of which life and intelligence inherently strive toward.

He describes his ontology in somewhat confused terms, calling it “a dualism” because it’s both “a materialism” and “an idealism”, but it sounds plainly like a physicalism phenomenon to me, and he does explicitly say that there is nothing supernatural about it.

@Gnomon I’m wondering if you’re familiar with this guy.

That’s why every non-local cop has to have a long-time local partner (just like you describe) to keep them in check.

And the locals have to have an outside partner to keep potential local biases in check too. Perhaps dispatched from some kind of inter-community “exchange officer” program: everyone has to be a long-time local of somewhere, and then each local department sends some officers to this program to serve as outside checks on locals elsewhere, accepting another from elsewhere in exchange.

Checks and balances.

@180 Proof I like most of your suggestions, but I think this one needs a caveat, which I’ve been thinking about for some time:

A. IN ORDER TO MINIMIZE POLICE-VS-COMMUNITY OPPOSITION - As a condition for (essential services) federal funds, each state legistlature is required to establish statutory (phased-in) residency requirements (MINIMUM 5 YEARS) for all Municiple & County civil servants including, and especially, Police and Prosecutors so that they are required to live in the communities (i.e. neighborhoods, towns, cities & counties) in which they have sworn "to serve and protect"; the 5 YEAR MINIMUM is intended to prevent former police officers FIRED FOR A CRIMINAL COMPLAINT to be rehired soon thereafter by any other Police Department; — 180 Proof

I see potential for community-sourced police to be corrupted by local community biases in a way that non-local police would not. Say for instance the local crime scene is dominated by a particular gang, (or divided among several, one of) who then infiltrate and capture the police force (the way white power gangs already capture police forces), and look the other way on crimes committed by “their people”, while aggressively going after “the competition”. In less specific terms, a majority is not always right — a bunch of local white cops accurately serving the community will of their racist mostly-white community is not good for the handful of black people who live there too.

For this reason, balanced against your concerns, I’ve long thought that police should operate in pairs, one of whom is a long-time local and one of whom is an outsider, to check and balance each other against these respects concerns.


On the broader note of police reform, I think the long term optimal goal, compatible with anarchism even, is for the law to spell out explicitly what kind of acts are permissible for ANYONE to take in response to what kind of criminal offenses (basically what violence is accepted in response to what other violence), and for the police to simply be ordinary citizens with no special powers or privileges above and beyond those, merely paid to go do the job that anyone is allowed to do, just to make sure somebody is doing it. Then whenever police have to use violence, a trial is held exactly as it would be if a civilian had done the same, to determine if it was indeed a just application of violence. This this discourages police from escalating situations unless it is clearly and unambiguously necessary to use force, because if they jump the gun with their guns they’re as likely to be convicted of murder as some vigilante would be.

On these recommendations, I actually started to peruse the site more than glancingly, and found to my satisfaction that he attempts an answer to the question that was the initial fixation of my existential anxiety last year (the seemingly inevitable eventual end of everything in the heat death of the universe).

However, I'm failing to find any kind of actual account for how the principle of creation he discusses could in principle be used to survive the expected death of the universe.

There are obvious sci-fi ways to prolong life past the "natural" death of things (ignoring the comparatively trivial problem of prolonging the biological lifespan of humans): Dyson spheres powering star-lifting prolonging the life of all the stars and enabling their movement, which in turn can enable the construction of the galactic equivalents of Dyson sphere around supermassiveblack holes, harvesting their Hawking radiation for a ridiculously long time even after the stars have all long burned out.

But that still eventually, in a ridiculously distant future, looks like the universe eventually has to run out of usable energy.

In the midst of my dread last year I found hope in realizing that the accelerating expansion of the universe means the universe is not actually a closed system, that new energy is being created all the time, and so that gives hope for a possible unending energy source, if some way of harnessing dark energy were possible. But every hypothetical idea for that I could come up with got shot down by people even more knowledgeable in physics than I am.

Bob Doyle, the man behind this Information Philosopher site, is supposedly a professional astrophysicist, so he should know more than those people who were shooting my hopes down last year. But I don't see any alternative account on his site for what a future free from heat death is supposed to look like.

Does anymore more familiar with his work than me have any pointers to where he addresses anything like that?

Hey, a local! I'm next door in Ojai. Just went up to Punch Bowls on Monday morning and saw your alma mater.

Great quote. I often point out in race-and-poverty-related discussions that point about addressing poverty regardless of race being sufficient to counteract the racism left after explicit legally enshrined racism is eliminated, and often people attack that idea as itself racist faux race-blindness. It’s heartening to see that MLK himself had things very much along those lines to say too.

It's kind of linear though, since it began with slavery>low class society>mixed society. — EpicTyrant

I think “linear” was meant not in opposition to “non-linear” but to “exponential”. Being born to a wealthy family not only gives you a head start, but being ahead for any reason gives you a speed boost; and vice versa being behind for any reason. So the poor (and disproportionately black) get held back from advancing out of the lower position they’re already in, while the rich get a hand up in advancing even higher than they already are.

The class-race connection StreetlightX highlights has the interesting implication that a lot of structural racism can be fixed without explicitly addressing race at all. If you help all poor people equally regardless of race, you disproportionately help black people automatically because the poor are disproportionately black.

These incidents of racially biased police violence don’t look “structural” in that way though, as it seems the police are not just targeting the poor equally regardless of race, but targeting blacks specifically for racially motivated reasons.

You absolutely can, and the history of philosophy is shaped by people who have.

After the first recognized western philosopher, Thales, in the period that we now call Presocratic philosophy, there were two broad schools of thought. One was the Ionians, following mostly after Thales' student Anaximander, who focused largely on reasoning about the natural world. The other was the Italiotes, following mostly after Anaximander's student Pythagoras, who placed heavy emphasis on mathematics.

That period ended with the work of Socrates, which incorporated elements of both schools of thought. But then in what we call the Classical era of philosophy, there were again two broad schools of thought. One followed after Socrates' student Plato, and echoed the more abstract leanings of the Italiotes. The other followed after Plato's student Aristotle, and echoed the more practical leanings of the Ionians.

The field was again united much later under the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, which again incorporated elements of both Platonism and Aristotelianism, in what we call the Medieval period of philosophy. But out of that unified Scholasticism the field was again divided, at the start of what we call the Modern period of philosophy. One side of that division came to be called the Rationalists, following largely after philosophers like Rene Descartes and echoing the abstract leanings of the Platonists. The other were called the Empiricists, following largely after philosophers like John Locke and echoing the practical leanings of the Aristotelians.

Then Immanuel Kant once again briefly reunited philosophy, explicitly creating a synthesis of Rationalist and Empiricist thought. But following Kant, in what I like to call the Postkantian period (as historians disagree about where or whether the Modern period ended), philosophy was again divided. On the one hand, what was called the Continental school, following philosophers such as Georg Hegel, echoed the practical leanings of the Empiricists. On the other hand, the Analytic school, following philosophers such as Bertrand Russel, echoed the abstract leanings of the Rationalists. — “The Codex Quaerentis: Introduction”

My own philosophy aims to synthesize/hybridize those two current streams of philosophical thought, and also to take the best of both worlds on each separate philosophical topic.

When I discovered professional philosophy [...] I thought that that field was the place where I would find what I was looking for, and that that was the name for it: the right philosophy.

I didn't find it. But in time I found most of the parts of it. They just needed to be shaped and polished a bit, assembled together in the right way, and a few gaps filled in. While studying, I "tried on" the many different philosophies I learned of, but never found one that felt like "the right fit" — an existing, notable "-ism" that I could endorse without reservation. I found that often opposite sides of a philosophical disagreement each made strong points and weak points, and that their strong points were not necessarily in conflict, even as they defeated the other side's weak points. Yet I was disappointed that nobody seemed to espouse a position that combined all the strong without any of the weak. I found also that views on one topic depended heavily on views on another topic, but those dependencies were often not accounted for. Likewise, I found that solutions to problems in one area often had parallel solutions to problems in another area, appealing to the same principles but in different domains, which were again often not accounted for.

So I began this work, documenting my own views on the various topics within philosophy, the combinations of strong points made by everyone on every side of every topic, the missing pieces still unaccounted for after that, and the symmetries and interrelations between them, tracing both all of my own views and all of those I found problematic back to small sets of very general principles. — “The Codex Quaerentis: Introduction”

For me the ambivalent/ironic position is connected to a realization of thrownness, of how history lives in us, constraining us while making us possible.The earnest philosopher (the totalizer who has it all tied up in a nice little bundle, his existence and ours) ignores that he was shaped by a past that also limits what he can see and understand. — path

To my eye the difference between them seems not* one of ignoring vs acknowledging, but of fighting vs giving in. The “earnest” philosopher can acknowledge that he is inevitably biased and that attaining complete objectivity is impossible, but still try to bracket out his biases and get as close to objectivity as he can. The “ironic” philosopher, on the other hand, sees that inevitability and impossibility as an excuse to not even try to do the best he can, and reads the “earnest” philosopher’s attempts as foolish or even arrogant.

*Rather than this dichotomy being either the way you say it is or the way I say it is, perhaps we should apply the tactic of dissolution here too, and recognize that these are two different dichotomies. There ARE some who don’t acknowledge their biases and the impossibility of total objectivity, and some who do. Among those who do, there are those who try anyway, and those who just give up. Clear examples of the three are the naive religious folk who think God gives their lives meaning, the Absurd Hero of Camus, and the existential nihilist.

My entire philosophy is actually structured around that kind of division, finding the ways that various answers to each philosophical question fall along those lines, eschewing both the fideistic and the nihilistic approaches, and championing the way analogous to that Absurd Hero.

You misquoted me — RogueAI

Assume a miracle happens and people shrink down to electrons — RogueAI

Or would it, because it has eyes instantly collapse/split because it gets entangled with itself and as such never see all positions at once? — ChatteringMonkey

This.

:100: :clap: I was hoping someone would give a more complete explanation of MWI while I was gone.

I completely agree that sophistry in that sense is a problem, precisely as you have stated.

I only disagree that "rhetoric" necessarily refers to that. To quote myself again from immediately before my previous quote:

...some philosophers such as Plato were vehemently opposed to rhetoric, seeing it as manipulative sophistry without regard for truth, in contrast with the logical, rational dialectic that he and his teacher Socrates advocated. His student Aristotle, on the other hand, had a less negative opinion of rhetoric, viewing it as neither inherently good nor bad but as useful toward either end, and holding that because many people sadly do not think in perfectly rational ways, rhetorical appeals to emotion and character and such are often necessary to get such people to accept truths that they might otherwise irrationally reject. I side much more with Aristotle's view on this matter, viewing logic and rhetoric as complimentary to each other, not in competition. — The Codex Quaerentis: On Rhetoric and the Arts

The video is a joke response; it's a song called "I'm On A Boat" by The Lonely Island.

The rest of my post isn't a joke.

Negligibly close to zero, yes.

Odds comparable to a dropped and broken egg un-dropping itself into an intact egg again.

Short answer:



Apparently the Chumash of California (my home) may have had prehistoric contact with the Polynesians as well, as the tomol (sewn-plank canoe) technology used by them is only known from one other place in the world: Polynesia.

Also, the Chumashan language is unlike any of the surrounding languages, and their creation myth involves coming to the mainland from the local islands (via a Rainbow Bridge, probably unrelated to the Norse bifrost).

If people "shrink down to electrons", then they behave exactly like electrons, because now they are electrons.

As for what the experience of those electrons is, which I think is what you really want to get at, it's nothing particularly special. The electron doesn't experience any kind of self-interaction, as in the electron's charge, spin, mass, momentum, all of its properties remain unchanged by the interference of its wavefunction with itself. It only experiences something when it interacts with the screen it hits, and it only hits the screen at once place... per world. Exactly the distribution of places it hits across the possible worlds is what changes from its wavefunction's self-interaction, but it had a range of possible places it could have hit anyway before that.

As for what it's like to have your wavefunction collapse upon interacting with something else, that's basically the whole story of the Many-Worlds Interpretation: when the scientists watch the double-split experiment, they only see each photon hit in one place per world, but upon firing each photon, and its "wavefunction collapsing" to that one location from their point of view, they get entangled with the electron's wavefunction distribution, and a different version of them sees each possible outcome of the experiment in a different possible world. But none of them are any the wiser of their other selves.

And since everything is quantum, this is happening everywhere all the time, including to you right now, so you're intimately familiar with what it's like already. It's pretty ordinary.

The thing is, the information of the image isn't any kind of special thing above and beyond the arrangement of the photons, so you would need some ordinary optical explanation for how that pattern of photons got shuffled around somewhere for some period of time only to reappear intact later. Entropy would explain why they would tend to come out of that process imperfectly, but that's like saying the image reflected by a mirror or seen through a camera and then projected somewhere is imperfect... you still need the mirror, or the camera/projector, or something, to explain how it stayed even as intact as it did, and didn't get mangled beyond comprehension as the photons just scattered off of an ordinary surface.

Physics freedom is useless to within mental freedom, and harmless with enormous of it (e.g. Stoic or Buddhist temperament).

Short answer is that that kind of shrinking is impossible by the same laws of physics you’re wondering about.

Not by itself but the solution involves it.

I think patterns are one of the most important ontological concepts, and most of the rest of ontology is just about structuring patterns in our experiences.

... The particular occasions of experience are thus the most fundamentally concrete parts of the world, and everything else that we postulate the existence of, including things as elementary as matter, is some abstraction that's only real inasmuch as postulating its existence helps explain the particular occasions of experience that we have.

Some of these abstract things are so fundamental that we could scarcely conceive of any intelligent beings comprehending reality without the use of them. Immanuel Kant called these kinds of things, things we cannot exactly observe but which we cannot help but use to structure the things that we do observe, "categories". The ones that I will describe here are not exactly the ones that he describes, though there is significant overlap. The first thing we need to do to structure our experiences is to identify patterns in them. To do that, we need a pair of concepts that I call "quality" and "quantity", which allow us to think of there being several things that are nevertheless the same, without them being just one thing: they can be qualitatively the same, while being quantitatively different. Any two electrons, for instance, are identical inasmuch as they are indistinguishable from each other, because every electron is alike, but they are nevertheless two separate electrons, not one electron. In contrast, the fictional character Clark Kent is, in his fictional universe, identical to the character of Superman in a quantitative way, not just a qualitative way: though they seem vastly different to casual observers, they are in fact the same single person. If two people are said to drive "the same car", there are two things that that might mean: it could mean that they drive qualitatively identical cars (or as close to it as realistically possible, e.g. the same year, make, and model), or it could mean that they drive the same, single, quantitatively identical car, one car shared between both of them. With these concepts of quality and quantity, we can describe patterns in our experience as quantitatively different instances or tokens of qualitatively the same tropes or types. Out of this arise the notion of several different things being members of the same set of things ("qualities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "classes", an abstraction away from sets, and "quantities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "cardinality", an abstraction away from the measure of a set or class). And with that can be conducted all of the construction of increasingly complex abstract objects built from sets as detailed in my previous essay on logic and mathematics... — “The Codex Quaerentis: On Ontology, Being, and the Objects of Reality”

I then go on to talk about space, time, and possible worlds all being abstractions in which to organize those patterns of experiences, and things like substances and causation likewise.

The pejorative sense of “sophistry” that I’m aware of, the one associated with a negative sense of “rhetoric” (which I wasn’t intending to use, but @David Mo seems to mean), seems to be of discursive partners who are uninterested in discovering together what is or isn’t actually a correct answer to the questions at hand, but instead simply in WINNING: convincing everyone that they were right all along, whether or not they really are.

It seems to me then, @path, that that pejorative sense of “sophistry” is quite what you seem to be against, as it involves a kind of closed-minded disinterest in finding out if you were wrong, and more interest in showing everyone that you were right all along.

I see that on the desktop, but on the phone there is no such thing on the left.

Looking at this post from the front page, I don’t see any way to tel that it is in the feedback forum. I’ve wondered before myself if there’s some way that I just haven’t noticed.

Nope, Hawking fixed that with his eponymous radiation.

While information can’t be created or destroyed, like energy it can be rendered inaccessible, through the exact same process: the second law of thermodynamics’ inevitable increase of entropy.

Energy and informational are quite closely related (and are in effect the modern equivalents of substance and form). Heat energy is essentially the same as informational noise: it is just disorder. “Noisy” arrangements of energy are all that heat is.

The second law, in its deeper statistical form, basically says that the information of the universe gets noisier, more disordered, over time; it losing usable energy to heat is just a byproduct of that, since heat is noisy energy. And just as it is hard to extract useful information from a noisy source, so too is it consequently difficult to extract usable energy from heat.

The upshot here being that although the information is not destroyed, it is still lost, inaccessible, through the passage of time, just like usable energy gets lost to useless heat over time.

I was thinking again about Syamsu’s system of philosophy as I understand it, and it occurred to me that if “mind”, “will”, and “god” are all interpreted in the trivial senses of “having a first person experience”, “not being determined”, and a non-personal pantheistic kind of “god” (as differentiated from more substantial functional senses of mind and will, and a personal god), and then the duality is dissolved (so all objects are subjects, all “creators” are “created”, etc), I don’t actually disagree with it all that much anymore.

Of course, I suspect Syamsu would object vehemently to all of those caveats, so we really don’t agree at all, but I found it interesting to identify those exact differences between us, and that they are so small and simple and kind of beautifully symmetrical, when on the surface his views look like incoherent nonsense to me that are so drastically different from my own.

A purpose is whatever something is good for, regardless of whether it was created intentionally to serve that good.

I was called a "one note liberal" earlier which is kind of funny because I don't remember the last time I was ever called a liberal. I'm center-right/libertarian. — BitconnectCarlos

In historical and non-American contemporary usage “liberal” means basically the same thing as the contemporary American usage of “libertarian”, and even in America nowadays people further left than the Democratic party are picking up that usage to refer to anyone non-socialist but not socially conservative, i.e. the center-right

The 'important cosmic enigmas' are also known as or at least entangled with issues of prime concern. Of course philosophy can retreat from these difficult issues into a kind of bland technicity, but that's a long way from Socrates, for better or worse. — path

I don’t mean to suggest we turn away from “cosmic enigmas”, just that we don’t mistake our own confusion for those profound depths in need of plunging.

I believe that the main method of philosophy is not rhetorical but dialectical. Large discourses with persuasive rhetorical intentions - in a sophistic way - are the negation of philosophy. — David Mo

I don’t mean “rhetorical” in a sense that implies sophistry or opposes dialectic. I just mean it as in caring about the style and presentation and other non-rational aspects of communication, above and beyond just being technically correct in your logic. To quote myself:

I like to use an analogy of prescribing someone medicine: the actual medicinal content is most important of course, but you stand a much better chance of getting someone to actually swallow that content if it's packaged in a small, smooth, sweet-tasting pill than if it's packaged in a big, jagged, bitter pill. In this analogy, the medicinal content of the pill is the logical, rational content of a speech-act, while the size, texture, and flavor of the pill is the rhetorical packaging and delivery of the speech-act. It is of course important that the "medicine" (logic) be right, but it's just as important that the "pill" (rhetoric) be such that people will actually swallow it. — “The Codex Quaerentis: On Rhetoric and the Arts”

If that, then the synthesis of them should follow, or, the synthesis of them and something else subsumed under them, in order to complete a method. — Mww

I’m not sure what you mean here. If we’re teasing apart concepts that had been wrongly confused with each other, what then would synthesizing them back together again (in a better way?) be like?

Misery is traditional. Historically, almost everyone is always miserable. Except for the tiny ruling class, who are the ones that conservatism invariably protects, by keeping things however they are to support whoever is already in power.

It's not an organization. That's the point.

You may as well talk about "that notorious hacker Anonymous".

Anyone can call themselves "antifa". It's not an organized group with a membership roster. It's just a word that means "anti-fascist". If someone who is not anti-fascist calls themselves "antifa", they're just straight up lying.

Now that is the kind of violence that is warranted.

Antifa is going down, it will be proscribed. — Chester

What kind of government would ban anti-fascists? Maybe, I dunno, the kind that starts with an F...

Who are you addressing? All I have to lose is this trailer. Which is "everything" to me, having spent 20 years clawing my way up to it from the tool shed I started out in. But I don't even have a couch I could share with someone, or floor space enough to sleep on.

If we must consult the dictionary, it means a more emotional or forcible response than is justified. Justified means having, done for, or marked by a good or legitimate reason.

What you're calling an overreaction is "far less bad" than what it's a reaction to but is nevertheless an overreaction because it's unjustified. Unjustified means not shown to be right or reasonable. Reasonable means having sound judgment; fair and sensible. — praxis

I agree with all of that. That's basically what I've been trying to say to you all day.

I think we can all agree that violent rioting is not fair or sensible, but then we can also agree that murder by police is not fair or sensible and that systematic racism is not fair or sensible. So maybe we can stop talking about fairness and sensibility and start talking about the emotional response. — praxis

Yes, all of that is not fair or sensible, I'm glad you agree. But none of what I've said is meant to judge the emotional response as not fair or sensible. I think I've been careful to distinguish between the emotions and the actions. The kind of anger that the actions express is absolutely justified. But it sounds like at least you and I now agree that that justified anger doesn't in turn justify any and all actions. I wouldn't be talking about any of this if people light StreetlightX hadn't seemed to be trying to defend the actions, not the emotions.

If the conversation had just been like this...

"Murder is bad."
"Yeah, it really is. Looting and vandalism isn't okay either though."
"No, of course not. Not as bad as murder though."
"Oh definitely not."
"And people are justifiably angry."
"Yeah, but that doesn't excuse any and all behavior."
"No, but it's understandable why people feel like acting out."
"Of course. I understand, even if I don't approve."
"Reasonably. Anyway, about those awful murders..."

...then we could have avoided this whole long tangent.

"This is not an overreaction" sounds to me like "this is the appropriate, just, and fully warranted response", in other words, "it's perfectly okay". — Pfhorrest

I have no words... — praxis

Your own dictionary quotes above are all the words you need, as this is saying the same thing as that.

It's far less bad than, as you say, the incalculable suffering caused by systematic racism that is now symbolized by the George Floyd murder. — Pfhorrest

I don't see how it can be said to be an overreaction then. — praxis

Because "overreaction" doesn't mean "worse than what it's a reaction to".

But just being less bad than that doesn't make it perfectly okay. — Pfhorrest

What is this either/or? has anyone actually said it was okay? — praxis

Maybe it's been a miscommunication (like this "overreaction" confusion you and I are having), but it's sure sounded like some people mean that, including you when talking to me just now. "This is not an overreaction" sounds to me like "this is the appropriate, just, and fully warranted response", in other words "it's perfectly okay". I gather now, if you're agreeing that it's not perfectly okay, that you take "this is not an overreaction" to mean "this isn't worse than what it's a reaction to". And I agree with that, if that's what you mean -- it's not worse -- but that's not what those words would sound like to me without all this extensive clarification. They sound like "this is perfectly okay".