• An Argument Against Eternal Damnation
    Well, imagine a situation where the state represents the will of God and delivers punishment for those who transgress divine law.

    Eternal damnation might take the form of life sentence and torture until death (the end of eternity).

    See South Korea.
  • Is dead a state of being?
    When is a dead cat no longer a cat? To be or not to be... a dead cat, that is the question.

    Hmmm... Important philosophical wonders.
  • In Coprophagy There Is Harmony
    Radio Lab: Poop Train

    Somewhat amusing podcast about biosolids from New York City sewage plants being transported to Colorado for use in agriculture for a time.

    My own city makes this stuff, biosolids (sewage cake), but I bet it gets thrown into the landfills. Apparently studies show that it's ecologlically safe but I wonder how exhaustive the testing has been.
  • Am I A Misanthrope or Something Else?
    ↪Aleric


    Be glad you were born into a somewhat stable(?...) wealthy country where your grievances are minor. You're not typing from an arid internet cafe in Mauritania, are you? South Korea?

    By our current expectations about conveniences, the past was a total shit show. A look at history should make us misanthropes, or reconcile to us how terrible we have been and will be in the future.
  • Is the evolution of technology infinite?
    1. Will technological evolution make us have new desires that our current brain cannot imagine? — Eugen

    If we give a wild ape some cake with the certain knowledge that it has never tasted anything like it (cake), do we conclude that the ape potentially has a "new desire" based on the memory of that cake?

    Or think about opiates with humans which highjack the pleasure reward system. Prior to trying such drugs can a person really imagine the desire (pain of addiction) or pleasure (super high) it elicits.

    Desire usually entails a lack of a previously encountered stimuli and that stimuli having been integrated into habit. The satisfaction in the encounter of such stimuli is somewhat dependent on the severity of the desire for it. For example: someone who is extremely thirsty finds greater satisfaction in drinking water.

    I'd say that there are no "new desires" if were limiting the term to the full continuum of whatever the maximum or minimum configurations of pleasure are. However, desire isn't really separate from the object (stimuli). I don't think it really makes sense to speak about objectless desire.
  • Is the evolution of technology infinite?
    It is impossible to desire something without being able to imagine it. — Sir2u

    Unless of course you are seeing what you desire and there is no need to imagine it.

    There must be some animals that still desire despite a complete lack of imagination.

    A quottle is a grain of something between salt and sugar. So take what I say with a quottle.
  • Is the evolution of technology infinite?
    Please name one thing that you can desire without imagining it first. — Sir2u

    The Quottle. I can't imagine it but desire it. Let desire shape its form.
  • Life’s purpose(biology)
    Check out the adaptive dissipation theory by Jeremy England and others.

    Very basically I think it is that matter can organize itself to dissipate heat more effectively under certain conditions and this might be a framework for understanding how life started.

  • Why is public nudity such a taboo behavior, not only in the religious community but society as well?
    Clothes are more practical in Northern latitudes for races who lack pigment and to keep warm. Humanoid species lost their hair for some reason and this increased the practicality of a manufactured cover to protect vulnerable parts. Even in more benign equatorial latitudes where nudity in hunter-gather groups might be more common (sans Western influence) covering genitals might make sense.

    Current inherited customs likely grew around a very basic practical need for clothes while engaging in physical work.

    If you dug into game theory there might be some sense in which clothes actually perform some kind of Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) function on par with "poker face" type behavior in animals. The less you show in terms of weakness or strength the more you stand to gain when deciding how to act against a competitor or collaborator. It levels the playing field of first impressions.

    To some extent the severity of the taboo for any of us is an accident of history. The larger and more sophisticated the society, the more stratified it is by status and property, the more severe the customs imposed are out of a need to maintain order.
  • Collaborative Criticism #3
    ↪I like sushi


    What do you mean you don't know what it is? You tell me Professor Sushi. What you see is what you get, a fragment. I won't participate anymore sense I'm unlikely to write as much as required.

    It is a juxtaposition of two absurd scenarios which are fact based for the most part, one about accidentally killing snails and the other about saving them.

    The Rube-Goldberg machine is suppose to introduce a sense of absurd causal determinism which involves as much of the universe as it can be imagined to involve.

    Ideally there would be some illustration of the pointlessness of either saving a dying species or accidentally killing an invasive one, in light of what gives rise to these actions.
  • Is Daniel Dennett a Zombie?
    Dennett is definitely a zombie created by the blind process of natural selection.

    His consciousness is an illusion, born of competing neural circuitry.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Maybe claims for and against Trump based on what he has or hasn't done should be backed up with linked citations, not that anyone would believe any of them.
  • Collaborative Criticism #3
    Copper sulfate pentahydrate (26% solution) was applied to a 40,000+ gallon concrete pond complex at between 5-7 gallons per surface acre of 4 foot depth. The goal was to eliminate floating algae that resembled turds.

    Days later the devastation to the pond snail population was apparent. A thick foul smelling protein foam coated the surface of pond # 3 with hundreds of tiny floating empty shells.

    The pond snails were dead, along with the dragonfly nymphs.

    The man who might be charged with this mundane collateral damage, the poisoner, was really just another vital mechanism in a much greater network of looping and crossing Rube-Goldberg machines.

    __________

    Miles upland, in the K range, a great plastic wall protects the last tribes of a dying species, Achantinella fuscobasis, from rats and rose colored wolf snails.

    The woman in charge of preserving these lives in a shell counts them all to the rhythmic beats of another Rube-Goldberg network, whose modular causal chains necessarily involve a helicopter, the Smithfield Foods plant and the memory of a fossilized Ammonite.
  • Psych question: What is the root cause of depression?
    Learned helplessness is one theory for developing depression.

    A person is continually stuck in a stressful situation where no natural action can ameliorate the stress. They become conditioned to accept such negative states.

  • Ethics of Vegetarianism/Meat Eating
    It is likely a mistake to project the unique human capacity for suffering onto animals. We have a rather sophisticated sense of self having a past and a future. The worrying about these imaginary selves is not a irrelevant aspect of human suffering and should be taken into account.
  • Relinquishing solipsim.
    Worst possible outcome? — Shawn

    Hell has exits, one hopes. The Buddha on your shoulder might whisper something about "mindfulness" and the imaginary friend on the other might say something about benign distraction.

    When a solipsist isn't thinking that he is a solipsist, is he a solipsist in that moment?

    Solipsism is a manifestation of loneliness most likely. Find a distraction and don't indulge in nightmares.
  • Relinquishing solipsim.
    How does one stop being a solipsist once one? — Shawn

    Stop thinking about it.
  • Natural Rights
    In the end any appeal to rights requires whether they are recognized by whoever/whatever is obstructing them.

    Do crocodiles have a justice system? If I go swimming in a croc infested pool, have I ceded the natural rights to my life, if I indeed have a natural right to life?
  • Collaborative Criticism #2
    ↪praxis


    They are just notes of a premise.

    Youtube star causes outrage because of Ortolan Mukbang...
  • Collaborative Criticism #2
    Vignettes of Ortolan eaters across time from Roman era to today. One involves an a medival ship import and something happens... Someone steals inventory to try it out. Punishment is macabre.

    Servants having moral reservations while pricking the eyes of the small birds. Philosopher chef biased by gustatory lust defends the practice with his reasons.

    Dialogues as to the purpose of the veil of the Ortolan eater. Different humorous scenarios that cause the veil to come into being.

    Recipes from the Apicius cookbook (1st century?) Must be a roman recipe for Ortolan somewhere.

    Scald the flamingo, wash and dress it, put it in a pot, add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar, to be parboiled. Finish cooking with a bunch of leeks and coriander, and add some reduced must to give it color. In the mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root, mint, rue, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and the fond of the braised bird, thicken, strain, cover the bird with the sauce and serve. Parrot is prepared in the same manner.
  • Tired and exhausted.
  • Get Creative!
    When I get my act together and become an accomplished illustrator from 10,000 hours of practice, I'll be presenting:

    Oriental Landscapes using tea as paint.

    Tea dragon carrying toilet roll instead of pearl.

    Cups of tea colored tea, enjoyed in a tea house by tea drinkers.

    A sea of tea with a galleon of tea ahead of a squall.

    Toilet roll prayer wheels stained with tea runes.

    Biscuits and tea.

    Tea and biscuits.

    Tea Samurai beheading Coffee Samurai in duel.
  • Happy Star Wars day everyone!!
    The one in which a rogue Sith lord, Darth Exitus, initiates vaccum decay of the Star Wars universe in all time lines.
  • Genes Vs. Memes
    Now you’ve shifted the discussion to the disproved position of the tabla rasa (empty slate). If someone is born and denied sensory experience or help they certainly won’t go far and die quickly. That has very little to do with memes and more to do with basic sustenance.

    You seem to be equates memes with experience. That is patently false.     — I like sushi

    Eh, you're not being very charitable. Why wouldn't basic knowledge about how to survive constitute learned knowledge, culture (memes)? Subtract any culturally transmitted know how in absence of built-in instincts and there is a survival learning curve that can't really be easily overcome.
  • Genes Vs. Memes
    Another way of thinking about this would be to say that our genetic inheritance can no longer cause us to be evolutionarily unfit. What would make us unfit would be if somehow we failed to pass on our knowledge of science, medicine, etc. — Pinprick

    Whatever continues into the future is still dependent upon the actual continuity of genes. The memes need the genes as much as the genes need the memes.

    Curious comparison. Dawkins wants to explain human behaviour in terms of attributes of particles of human make-up that entirely lack such behaviour. Whereas you are objecting to explaining the behaviour of the whole (corporation) in terms of the actual behaviour its parts, (people). It seems a more reasonable project. — unenlightened

    Isn't animal behavior well explained by genes in theory? Memes (as a kind of horizontal information transfer) helps to explain the added complexity of human behavior.
  • Genes Vs. Memes
    Obviously genes are not selfish, and do not try to survive or multiply. — unenlightened

    Likewise, corporations are not selfish (they literally aren't persons) and do not try to survive or help their shareholders to multiply.
  • Can I change my name to 'Professor Death' please
    I'd rather be dead than in debt if that is any consolation.
  • What afterlife do you believe awaits us after death?
    Might as well throw the something from nothing thread into the Lounge also to be consistent.
  • Ideas for during quarantine
    FF7 Remake

    Let Madam M. give you a hand massage at the wall market.
  • What afterlife do you believe awaits us after death?
    There is only what it is like to be something. A world that isn't aware of itself at all is equal to a world that doesn't exist.

    So long as there is any life after death, there is an afterlife. Who is to say "our" life is by any means coherent as a piece rather than continuous with the whole universe.
  • Get Creative!
    ↪praxis


    Good stuff.

    It's an alternative world to Harold and the Purple Crayon.

    Hakuin and the Toilet Roll.
  • Member Picture Thread
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover


    Can't imagine a mustache, some sunglasses and a MAGA hat would change it much.
  • Get Creative!
    ↪praxis


    You must do much more of these.

    Maybe a silhouette of a retriever with toilet roll. Man shooting other folks for toilet roll, while retriever brings it back.

    Or ducks in sky carrying toilet roll being shot by man, dog retrieves toilet roll instead of duck.

    Flying toilet rolls being shot, carried back by dog.
  • Member Picture Thread
    I want to see more photo shopped members.
  • Problem solving thread
    @Wheatley

    You could always start acting like your "friend" to see what he thinks of his own behavior. Persistently ask for money.

    @Sir2u

    You can try asking Brittany Spears (and her network) for a grant. Make a list of rich people and start asking.

    @Fluke

    It's all about placebo, so pick something that you know to be benign and believe that it works without letting yourself know its a placebo! Grate fresh horseradish in the bath (that seems like an unusual experiment) and tell us what happens.
  • Compliments of the season.
    " I love you all, platonically of course." — Nils Loc
  • The Lounge
    Are you leaving The Lounge for the main forum, 2 days ago?

    I wish The Lounge was more popular than it is but far less popular than the main forum.
  • How to become an overman
    How to become the Alphamensch?

    You need to take risks, become physically strong, eat more meat, quit your cubicle job, learn to bow hunt, start testosterone doping and start a podcast.
  • Why do we demand Saffron?!
    I don't think Saffron is anymore labor intensive than any other agricultural crop, just that the amount of yield is low compared to the demand for it. It might be preferable to picking pineapples.

    Global agriculture is rife with labor injustice. Check out Rotten on Netflix, very interesting.


  • Coronavirus
    Coronavirus Age, Sex, Demographics

    I'm in the .2% risk pool if these rates aren't entirely nonsense. They say a majority of Chinese males smoke and this may exacerbate the the death rate since viral pneumonia is the principle killer.
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