"Can you really contemplate without having a conversation with yourself?" — believenothing

Your thread is possibly in the Lounge because the answer is straightforward and obvious, unless you want us to equivocate around your terms toward a contradiction or a new question.

If all/any contemplation amounts to a kind of conversation of the self with the self (reflectivity), correlations between internal private phenomena and external public phenomena, can we converse with ourselves without ever contemplating within ourselves?

Imagine a hypothetical simulacra of a person who has no sense of interiority at all. From the outside you might conclude they are fully capable of conversing with themselves... but would they also be contemplating? Can there be thought without interiority? If so, why does interiority exist at all?

Can a computer capable of some "thought" have zero sense of interiority?

Since when is perfection and omniscience necessary for knowledge??? — creativesoul

Yes, why make any criteria for absolute knowledge impossible. Instead we could just rely on ordinary language as when someone says "I know with absolutely certainty at this time that..." and said knowledge also can't reasonably be doubted, Is accepted as universal fact.

I'm absolutely certain at this time that if we remove your head from your body by whatever method you will die. No one can dispute this without an appeal to some extreme contingency or medical miracle that doesn't currently exist. That I know there could be hypothetical exceptions just further informs the perfection of such knowledge.

Maybe the next Black Swan will be a Talking Bodiless Head... Then we will just get used to the fact that some people don't die by absolute decapitation.

If we can dispense with the doubt that everything is possibly an illusion and therefore an epiphenomenon of an underlying truth, there are many indisputable facts. Why wouldn't these facts count as a provisional kinds of absolute knowledge.

I need to absorb water to survive as a large mammal currently. This doesn't eliminate the possibility that I could survive without water in some unknown future by some novel physiology but many would agree the fact is indisputable.

• Being held responsible/reprimanded for an outcome that isn't my fault.
• Not being able to contact a service representative for poor/absent service as a customer.
• Managing passwords
• Folks in stores who are looking at their phone while blocking isles with their cart/bodies.
• The gratuitous concrete features/surfaces at my job which are functionally useless and have to be pressure washed multiple times a year.
• Pressure washers ( one of mankind's worst inventions, as they are pieces of fucking shit!)
• Discontinued or unavailable manufacturing parts or planned obsolescence (should be laws against this bullshit)

No, they are proof that we can build things. — Sir2u

Actually, button pressing and channel changing à la the metaphor is about ending one's life.

A more direct, sober, offensive question is under what circumstances should suicide be condoned?

Since the state of death is not an experience, the only experiential alternative to death is a kind of life. Might this make the prospect of death less psychologically severe for us if we believe it.

There will only ever be life after death but it won't be my or your life. Possibly it is like something to be a turtle with a straw stuck up its nose.

I keep asking ChatGPT at what ambient temperature it is impossible to eat pizza in and this it what it gives me:

"there is no specific ambient temperature at which it becomes impossible to eat pizza."

Surely there is an ambient temperature in which it is impossible to eat pizza, right?

Then it tries to correct itself:

"Apologies for any confusion. Yes, there is indeed an ambient temperature at which it becomes physically impossible for a human being to eat pizza. That temperature is absolute zero, which is approximately -273.15 degrees Celsius or -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit."

Can I eat pizza on the Sun?

"No, it is not possible to eat pizza on the Sun. The Sun's surface temperature is estimated to be around 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,932 degrees Fahrenheit), which is incredibly hot and would instantly incinerate any object, including pizza."

Is the best weather to eat pizza in any possible weather to eat pizza in, if eating pizza at any time is the best time?

"Yes, if you enjoy eating pizza at any time, then any weather can be a suitable time to enjoy pizza. "

How do you know you're being objectively correct in attributing the change in taste to your appendectomy?

It's not a matter of negative symptoms from eating fatty foods but purely down to taste?

Edit: They say there is a connection between taste and your microbiome and so it stands to reason if you were given a broad spectrum antibiotic for your surgery, maybe your change in taste is a result of a change in your GI flora. But that was 15 years ago, so what has sustained your opinion that you dislike fatty foods?

Sounds like you are talking about something more than the television.
But no, there is no remote to the channels of life. — Sir2u

But to serve this cringey metaphor my way, there are plenty of button-like events that can turn off the television, which amounts to changing the channel. :chin:

This is the age of remotes. The buttons are everywhere, illumined on glassy surfaces. They are the proof of our free will.

No one is responsible for tire dust. — Nils Loc


I’m responsible for the tire dust that my tires and I produce. — praxis

Well we've encountered the obvious implicit yet again: the problem of a diffusion of responsibility and its relationship to the tragedy of commons.

Thoughts and prayers :pray: for a livable future.

Where I live, society entitles me to do a lot of messed up shit with things I may own. I’m responsible for all of it. — praxis

Tire dust is supposedly an environmental/health catastrophe that no one ever mentions. No one is responsible for tire dust.

@NOS4A2

Would be interested in NOS's response to the OP. :naughty:

No. There are already plenty of laws that determine what you can and can't do with what is owned, depending on what that thing is.

Neither ought we have the entitlement depending on external costs to others. We own nothing in perpetuity, so to destroy something that might have many generations of utility (like a sustainable output of land) is wrong.

But the devil is in the details concerning what we ought to be allowed to do with what things.

The annoying guru, Sadhguru, performs an age old ritual of supposedly turning mercury into a solid by mind alone. This is purely chemistry however, where a different metal is introduced into the mercury at room temperature to create an amalgam. He's a liar!

What degree of certainty do we have about the immediate outcome of taking the red pill and forgoing simulated happiness? I feel like the red pill offers an absolute unknown. What if the truth is really horrible/regrettable, like one is forced into a condition where whatever constitutes this new found "truth" of another world is next to useless.

The blue pill gives us what is ostensibly certain, assuming we trust whoever allows us to make the decision. We get to live a long and happy life, after being reborn in ignorance of having chosen at all.

The red pill gives us what is uncertain, possibly misery, disease and premature death in some foreign reality. Though this hypothetical is colored by what we know happens in the film.

I'd take the blue pill, assuming I could ever trust that the promise is true.

Afterall, we've got super smart folks pontificating about how our everyday sense of phenomenal reality is already an illusion. I don't think whatever constitutes reality here offers us the promise of control. Maybe it does in a collective sense, assuming I'm a member of Zion who has some knowledge of the world as it stands. I guess I'm uncertain about exactly what is on offer.

What if the probability was that 99 times out of 100, choosing the red pill results in death, or transport to a kind of life our ancestors lived 10,000 years ago, but we can't know this. While on the flip side, however short our simulated life is, it is determined to be a good one.

Edit: But I hope God (the Architect) isn't recording this as a preference...

This theological madness leads down a dangerous road, to a hut a cannibals, who deem themselves God, eating animals which they know to be God.

Which is to say nonvegetarianism doesn't make sene and that given how scripture defines God, He is completely within his rights to eat us. — Agent Smith

Maybe your leaving out other scriptual/controversial/contradictory attributes of God that might clear up or further confuse this issue.

It might be, that given scripture, God doesn't make sense. Why are you assuming God needs to eat?

Why should it follow that because man is in the image of God, that God must eat? Why would God have organs if those organs represented a natural constraint/form of an animal? Mouths and anuses represent limits he need not abide by. Though to be honest I have no good traction on what scripture conveys God to be like.

Maybe, to be metaphorical, killing suffices God's Appetite (synonymous with his Will). He's allegedly done a lot of that.

claims that the difference between God and us humans is not the same as that between us and animals. Do you agree? — Agent Smith

In the absence of some doctrinal/textual/institutional authority that speaks of a special nature of God, we can make up any relation we want. Here we become anthropologists and have to decide which faith concerning "God" we'd like to study. We then can collect beliefs concerning this specific question.

But I have no real opinion, insofar as the question might as well be an exercise in pure imagination of what we'd prefer God to be like.

Though I suppose I'm a pantheist, who could've been a pig, and imagines that God suffers as we do under random assignment of an existential lottery. All beings are fundamentally more alike than they are different. We should struggle to minimize suffering, however absurdly futile that sometimes feels.

Pantheism = God is in all things

Relative distinctions then collapse or they're arbitrary with respect to God.

As I thrust the knife into my pig Marl's throat, I whispered: "Even God must end."

Later that week I smelled the rich scent of Marl's pork belly sizzling in God's pan.

"Oh God, why does the scent of bacon entice me to murder you, our kin?"

There was no answer but a mental picture of God enthralled in a terrifying bliss or horror of self-consumption.

"I felt disgust as I was eating Marl. She was God. And I was God. Together we are one, always eating one another in some form or another."

The disgust bloomed to a fever pitch of madness, whereupon I stabbed myself in the heart.

And now I am just a machine narrator (God), fleshless and free of sin, for the many happenstances of God.

How did you do the landscapes? — frank

It's water color style with inputs of : "English moor tors" and "English moor gorse".

Share your recipe for photorealistic moss on stuff.

Language has no definite purpose.

It solves what it solves and it fails where it fails.

I've memories of perusing my university's philosophy section, which lead me to conclude that philosophy is that free domain of language transformation which can approach gibberish. Linguistic catastrophe is definitely most relevant to philosophers.

natural selection, which is a statistical process — Benj96

Can anyone elaborate why you'd call natural selection a statistical process? Statistics is a mathematical/scientific way of drawing useful information from sets of data, so would it be right to say that any natural process is inherently statistical? Rather the products of natural selection (taxonomic groups/populations), lend themselves to study by statistical processes.

Like what if we also said, planetary formation is a statistical process. Is that any more or less legitimate than saying natural selection is a statistical process? Are we instead just suggesting that it concerns variations of a population/set and this is sufficient to call it statistical?

This AI art generation is terribly addictive. Though I feel bad for artist now, whose images are being referenced for generation just because they exist online. Apparently we're free to monetize these generated images.

Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. — T Clark

Are you implying what I said is just nonsense. Why not just say so explicitly.

The character or mode of thought of a bigot; obstinate and unreasonable attachment to a particular creed, opinion, practice, ritual, or party organization; excessive zeal or warmth in favor of a party, sect, or opinion; intolerance of the opinions of others. — T Clark

Sounds like all humans are naturally bigots by this definition. There are any number of non-harmful(?) ways of being which will elicit intolerance of others with appeal to what is (sub)culturally normal.

I like where you're going with this. — Agent Smith

Not sure where this is going. You've yet to elaborate.

Are you drawing a connection between what perceived social status confers on the value of a compliment? The saddest person might have then have extremely low status for you. So like a girl in the movie Mean Girls, you say on reception of said compliment from notoriously sad Megan: "Ewwww, Megan, go join the pigs in the cafeteria, and stop insulting me with your gross ass compliments. You'll never be our friend."

So they'd remain silent, because they know their compliment would be wrongly construed as an insult by their peers. But why? Because so and so said so, thinks so?

And in their silence they'd further suffer/indulge in their sadness for failing to try at all because they know what others think.

Or they'd land the compliment and the burden of their sadness would lift, but not so much more than the weight of a needle on a camel's back.

Maybe the saddest figure would not be able to speak anyway. The prospect of will and motion would be too sad... or so sad as transcend/dissolve any self recognition of sadness. The attribution would come from second and third parties and the internal state of the "sad" person might be ineffable.

"Look how sad that guy is?"

"That isn't a sad guy, that's a catatonic statue, lost in the bliss of oblivion."

"Sad from my point of view and from the Queen's. RIP. There is poo all over him and that's sad."

I suppose because faces are always front and center of a general portrait and hands/appendages are often hidden and more complex for 3D rotation, could explain why the AI messes up appendages more often than faces. I'd be impressed if one could generate what passes for an anatomically correct hand on this app.



Perfect Hand



Anatomically Correct Hand

Gothic Kabuki Theater



Japanese Print Autumn

There is much thanks to give for the luck of not suffering what we could've suffered by pure cosmic incident. There is much thanks to give that life is transitory also, that all will pass away. Death washes away intolerable/insufferable memory/circumstance.

A photon moving at light speed experiences no passage of time — jgill

The mathematics of Special Relativity tells us that as a reference frame moves at ever higher speeds, its space contracts ever smaller and its time becomes ever slower, relative to the stationary observer. In the limit that its speed approaches the speed of light in vacuum, its space shortens completely down to zero width and its time slows down to a dead stop. Some people interpret this mathematical limit to mean that light, which obviously moves at the speed of light, experiences no time because time is frozen. But this interpretation is wrong. This limiting behavior simply tells us that there is no valid reference frame at the speed of light. A reference frame that has exactly zero spatial width and exactly zero time elapsing is simply a reference frame that does not exist. If an entity is zero in every way we try to describe it, how can we possibly say that the entity exists in any meaningful way? We can't. — Dr. Christopher S. Baird

Why is time frozen from light's perspective?

I still don't understand how something that is moving relative to something else can't experience change. No light in the universe is moving.... because it is traveling at the speed of light... but it isn't traveling at the speed of light... because it isn't moving. WTF?

Light doesn't exist from its own reference frame?! Seems as preposterous as saying light doesn't doesn't experience change from it's own perspective.

The practice/occurrence of retributive justice is where empathy often may not align with one's purported morality.

Does the punishment fit the crime/injury? Our personal/collective empathy for the victim/perpetrator might override a more enlightened constraint in dealing out punishments.

Our sportslike fevor in the arena of seeing who is good versus evil gets in the way thinking about what our moral acts ought to be.

All occasions of empathy might be moral issue in a sense, if it is important to be morally aware of the consequences of that empathy.

Circular Time: It's all going to just happen again for the very first time (like a virgin).

you have no logical reason to stop me from hammering a toothpick under your fingernail. — Leftist

That might depend on what you project your future circumstances to be in relation to others. Do you foresee consequences to your actions of actually hammering a toothpick under someone's fingernail? Do you have any logical reason to give against hammering a nail into your own hand? Why doesn't the future concern whether such action is reasonable with regard to what you want the future to be like?

We're social animals, our welfare heavily dependent on complex social exchanges of quid pro quo moral conduct. We're not crocodiles (though you could pretend to be like one to your own probable ruin).

There may be no ultimate moral facts (sanctified/enforced by a monotheist philosopher God's favor/retribution ) but there are relative moral facts/claims of a consensus or majority.

And certainly the king shouldn't be nearly helpless. — TiredThinker

In your case you'd probably prefer that the game ends quicker, so a slow and helpless king can't elude death by running all over the board.

But what would the point be?

The kings are too fat
From much lamprey pie and ale
And sit all day long.

They strategize on
Giant war maps of the world
Defending the realm,

Trying not to die
By hand of bishop or knight
Pawn, queen or archer.

They'd rather leave on
Their own terms, playing chess and
Listening to jazz.

Jazz is perfectly fine. — TiredThinker

Are you sure about this? Jazz is strong supporting evidence against living for some antinatalists.

When the songs of creation are just Jazz, how can one sleep through the night?

More importantly, who is wrong about what and have they been sufficiently disabused by peer review/pressure. Can they get the cane? Or is humiliation of being called out as a wrong doer enough.

Is that pro re nata? Or are you trying to tell us you look at porn first thing in the morning.

SCANDALOUS!

Taking the/a piss?

It's that obvious, eh? Can you elaborate further or is this THE END? — Agent Smith

It's just a humble prescription. Sing to yourself, hypnotize yourself, to try and be at ease. One of many possibilities to start the morning with.