If we had a cosmic entropy meter its needle would show a sudden advance every time such cataclysmic events happen. — Jacob-B

There is the linear ‘wear and tear’ of the universe; the dispersion of matter and dilution of energy, and there is non-linear catalytic jumps caused by supernovas, a collision of galaxies, and black holes. If we had a cosmic entropy meter its needle would show a sudden advance every time such cataclysmic events happen. — Jacob-B

Vaccum decay is strange. Could humans initiate vacuum decay in theory ( as a malentropic event)?

In Hawking’s book, once the Higgs Field becomes metastable, the vacuum decay bubble will emerge. Being at a high energy state, it will quickly move to consume everything at a low energy state, or everything else around it. The vacuum bubble moves along destroying atoms, turning everything it encounters into hydrogen. — Phillip Perry,

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/physicists-accidently-discover-a-self-destruct-button-for-the-entire-universe

This sounds like a reset to a lower entropic state (earlier type configuration of the universe), though how the hydrogen is spread in time and space, along with current rates of universal expansion, would probably make up a universe that is not comparable to a younger version of our universe on the largest scale.

It's not your fault you're lost but neither should that be cause to harm others from an inner spring of resentment. Do no harm, though that may seem impossible under stipulated conditions. Death can happen at any time.

Everyone is lost, except those who have decided they are not and submit themselves to what the believe is necessary in light of their attachments (Life).

Imagine someone less fortunate than you, tortured by fate, and love them. Even a gesture of artificial love (empty of authentic feeling) is better than nothing at all. Feel good that you know what it means to love your friends and family.

And it's like a learning-disabled level confusion--maybe because we're playing a game where we're trying to create problems to solve because we're bored? (and we unfortunately do not want to tackle more challenging but practical problems like making sure that everyone has housing, health care, etc.)--to be confused whether we're talking about what we're imagining existing as something other than something we're imagining. — Terrapin Station

We should all just keep reposting this post. This would've been a great modbot response in the old PF.

:rofl:

Nietzsche, Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," when the word "poor" would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. — Nietzsche, Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

To us, the difference between a person and a chocolate cake is obvious. We have a clear understanding of what is the one or the other. — Mind Dough

It's obvious in a particular and common context of interactions but if you were to set up a finer grain measure of comparison, for some possible reason, there might be a less clear understanding of the difference between what is human and chocolate cake. The cake disappears in digestion to become something else (as its divisible constituents undergoing biochemical transfomration). The difference is clear because its useful to know that clear difference.

Just like a question of when does life begin, for a moral consideration about a woman's choice to abort, when does cake end (this is not controversial). Furthermore, what is the empirical truth of chocolate cake consumption? Cake takes its meaning from everything else from which it takes its meanings.

Drawing boundaries is easy if those boundaries are somehow apparent, natural, given, settled in court, are justified by the miracle of utility, the applications technology, but things get fuzzy at extreme scales.

I don't know how humans cope with the amount of information out there but the mind has an interesting capacity to synthesize, reduce and unify toward socially or individually desirable ends.

Consciousness is a mystery but it is as mysterious as the thing it isn't (whatever that might be). It might be as mysterious as that which it unveils: chocolate cake as something other than it is.

Duckrabbit sips espresso as he gazes into the the 1st mirror.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which mirror captures my essence?

1st mirror replies: "It is I, my lord, the 1st of mirrors."

2nd mirror laughs: "It is also I my lord, the 2nd of mirrors."

Duckrabbit picks his nose with a tentacle.

"This coffee is the worth the blood of innocence."

(Edited by S.)

What is the internet?

I hope it isn't self-evident.

Oh, future AI lords, constrain our imagination that we may live another day. Create an existential quantifying function.

I am the king.

Long live the king. Subjects of Meinong, bow to me.

Therefore I win. — S

What did you win?

...?...

We can imagine things that aren't the case — Terrapin Station

What is the case? About what is the case?

What the hell is going on here?

It is probably also self-evident.

Elephants don't use snakes as blow darts.

What is human nature? — BrianW

One quote I like (as we've all encountered it) is by Protagoras (490-420 BC):

"Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."

Our species name, Homo sapiens, given by Carl Linneus is latin for "wise man", which given the precarity of our future might turn out to be a crude irony. Investigating alternatives of the specific epithet (ie. sapiens) will give us an idea of what characterizes the nature of the species in a single word. There is a great list in the Wikipedia: Names for the human species.

Ants and bees build cities/collectives with castes (preordained classes).
Apes and other social mammals have their politics (competitive hierarchies of social organization).
There is likely a rudimentary communication which prefigures symbolic language in a lot of social animals.
Some birds engage in inherited arts (dance, plumage, collection and artifice) for the sake of appealing to the opposite sex.

The consequences of applied technology is probably the greatest visible mark of the human animal. It dwarfs us and will be around long after we are gone. As a species we transform environments in the most extreme ways.

To close the broad field of inquiry about what is "human nature", which includes what any artifice could possibly unveil about our species, we can imagine the alternative names of Homo sapiens.

Homo avarus
Homo demens
Homo economicus
Homo faber
Homo hypocritus
Homo laborans
Homo mendax
Pan narrans
Homo sanguinus
Homo technilogicus

Each name could be the title of an essay describing that aspect of human nature. So what is the corresponding canon (library) worth reading by which Homo philosophicus might discover something about himself worth discovering?

How many testicles did it take to make this thread?

Is that you, WK? Good to see you are still active in the entropy amusement park. How are things in your part of the Pacific? I guess that's Paul narrating the radio stories? — Daniel V

Things are ok. Hope life is treating you well.

I suspect that is Paul's voice in The Replicator (his story). The second link is to his webpage. You can try and message him through the ko-fi.com profile.

He posted around the transition time (sale of PF) under his moniker, Paul. Though if he is still posting under another alias, I don't know which.




https://www.quietplease.org/originals/

The episode reminds me thoroughly of J.L. Borges collection Labyrinths, the introduction of a self-aware hypertexuality to reading text (now watching film) and the pressure of an up-ending idealistic metaphysics (life is a banal nightmare of eternal recurrence).

The looping backward gets a bit banal quickly, especially since no new choices are given. One can just as well imagine that all cinematic beginnings, middles and ends belong to Bandersnatch if the world resembles an absurd fantasy of bifurcating choice.

In my mind's eye I hope for an ending where he walks into the natural world and enjoys its tranquil serenity (choose now).

Or maybe he is a graphic artist, or painter, and finishes a work that satisfies him (Bandersnatch). Then he is having coffee with friends.

When you've killed your father countless times everything else might be banal by comparison.

'The thing (dreams of ice skating) that hath been, it is that which shall be (dreamnt again); and that which is done (blessings of coffee in the snow) is that which shall be done (some time ago): and there is no new thing (except a mystery) beneath the sun.' Pseudo Ecclesiastes 1:9

You might take inspiration for thinking about the topic of the soul and reincarnation from the movie Marjorie Prime.

It's about the simulation of loved ones (as Artificial Intelligence) based on data collection and human memory.

How cruel the universe would throw you talentless twats onto the trash pile of history, that even this choose your own adventure novel, The Philosophy Forum (A Thousand and One F8rking Threads), will eventually be buried in the cold inhuman servers of Palantir.

Your writings tend to generate just more writing and other benign tautologies, never really having any appeal except for all the stolen uncited content. You crap authors will only ever relatively win by the consensually mediated love for your peers.

Mwahahahah (laughs maniacally)

Nothing is at stake. Whether by moderator, critic, the tears of a loved one, or the end of time, you will be effaced.

The Borges Test, Alex Nevala-Lee

J.L. Borges belief in compression for the conveyance of ideas is probably valuable. This is the age of a great textual flood (babble). I'm still struck by what could possibly be extrapolated from Borges' Library of Babel. Each of works in his short story collection Labyrinths modify and expand the way we think about the others.

Though if you are writing a work purely for yourself, you're free to do as you please.

Calvino on Borges

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. — The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

Think Pelle said as much but this essay is famous and and will probably be relevant until we go extinct (when all the Kool-Aids have been drunk and we're finally dead).

Some of the architecture combines human anatomy, astronomical data, history, particle physics, sound engineering all into the structure itself. — AngryBear

The insertion here of particle physics as having any plausible relation to the development of Egyptian architecture is at question. This is not a magical leap of dubious New Age speculation? What have you been reading or watching?

I think it is completely natural for human beings to see the world through a mythopoetic lens (thinking by means of intuitive forms, myths, narratives, metaphor, analogy, dream images). This is the freedom to think at all, comparative to the freedom to move. The problem lies in the belief that any of our unchecked or provisional intuitions, reified abstractions, say something true about the world (pointing beyond themselves).

It could as well be the case that one might not care much for truth beyond it being a means to acquire or sustain power, to serve others, to be part of a group, to fully express oneself, or to feel less alienated and more at home in the world (or to do anything seemingly worth doing).

No but will do. Though why seek out new nightmares... Everything can be nightmarish if you're in the wrong state of mind.

Was reading J.L. Borges short story about Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, about a conspiratorial interpolation of a false world into the records of the real world by way of an enclyclopedia. As I was reading I thought pages were being magically added because the story seemed longer than I recollected. It made me terribly paranoid. The conspiracy in the story was also happening to me.

For a moment afterward I thought I was totally buried in my own solipsistic mind, that the surface of my vision was altogether too flat and close, smothering me, like I was stuck in a coffin or buried alive (my field of vision was the lid of my coffin). I was paranoid, panicked (felt like I couldn't breath).

I got up and started a Tai Chi program to try to anchor myself and improve mood.

I have a limited sense of what an absolute unmoored hell a severe schizophrenic episode might entail. Not to have recourse to a foundation of the real scares the shit out of me.

The Atlantic: When Hearing Voices is a Good Thing

But there was one stark difference, as Stanford News points out: "While many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful—and evidence of a sick condition." — The Atlantic: When Hearing Voices is a Good Thing by Olga Khazan

I remember now someone in a podcast brought up the work of Tanya Luhrman.

Seems to accord with Unenli's observation that the expression and reception of some (all?) kinds of mental illness is socially (culturally) mediated.

Absolutely, first person immersion helps with design. I imagine that was true for the ancient ivory carver who created the "Venus" figurine 35,000 years ago, found near Willnedorf, Austria, or whoever carved the Venus de Milo, or Jackson Pollock dribbling paint on canvas. — Bitter Crank

Well, furthermore, a first person immersion VR interface itself becomes as plastic as the thing being designed within it. So you can change scales, download pre-designed forms, project textures by various automated tasks and whatever else ingenious folks think up. VR would be a great way to collaborate across time and space while also saving energy compared to real world equivalent.

Though there is a sense in which it all seems rather absurdly redundant (as you are suggesting). The best 3-D printer is still probably the potters wheel and the potter, when all the machines go down. The fundamental virtual world is the one we experience sans all the fancy cybernetic extensions.

Has our grip on reality become so loose that we think the hardness of reality can just be waved away and depicted however we see fit? I hope we have not lost our grip to that extent. — Bitter Crank

We will be reminded of reality when the economy really collapses and all electronics stop. Then poof, no more The Philosophy Forum. Philosophy can take a back seat to the need to eat.

We should all be working on making this temporary reality less fragile.

The use of VR and 3D printing together has great potential. 1st person immersion helps with design.

Ted Talk: Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality.

In the above talk Seth gives an example of audio hallucination by nudging our brain to make sense of meaningless phonetic sequence by a forced association. It would be interesting to come up with as many possible alternative sentences that map perfectly on the phonetic rhythm which he uses. Some could be terrible and hateful and some could be quite positive.

Apophenia is an interesting phenomena but it must also be an applicable term for the way in which average (non-shizophrenic) folks perceive the world. The positive aspect of apophenia is when it it is adaptive (when it wouldn't be classified as apophenia). Could we say that projection of analogy and metaphor (rudimentary modes of understanding) are essentially partially controlled apophenic events? Wherever thoughts help us to imagine (hallucinate) the world as we think it is we are on shaky (provisional) ground.

There was an anecdote I heard about paranoia in non-westernized countries as having a more benign and even positive quality, better defined perhaps as pronoia than paranoia. This could just be complete BS though.

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Berkeley's idealism is too simple for complex minds. You have to be dumb to understand it. Or maybe you just have to be dumb to believe in it because of the pressure of default materialism.

Philo (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD), a Hellenized Jew, used the term Logos to mean an intermediary divine being or demiurge.[7] Philo followed the Platonic distinction between imperfect matter and perfect Form, and therefore intermediary beings were necessary to bridge the enormous gap between God and the material world.[33] The Logos was the highest of these intermediary beings, and was called by Philo "the first-born of God".[33] Philo also wrote that "the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated".[34]

Plato's Theory of Forms was located within the Logos, but the Logos also acted on behalf of God in the physical world.[33] In particular, the Angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was identified with the Logos by Philo, who also said that the Logos was God's instrument in the creation of the Universe.[33] — Wikipedia: Philo of Alexandria

Seems like Philo of Alexandria could partially responsible for how Christ became associated with the Word of God. It was a meme that took flight after the event. Some Christians were borrowing from Philo in preparing their propagandic literature.

Stranger still is that Philo (c25 BC-47 AD) was a contemporary of Jesus but does not bear witness to the historical man or events surrounding the man Jesus. (?)

jesusneverexisted.com: Philo of Alexandria

____________

"Now the image of God is the Word, by which all the world was made."

– Philo, "The Special Laws", I (81)

Not sure it is of any significance to the inquiry but when you stick λόγος into google translate, you get the following synonyms (uses):

reason
λόγος, αιτία, λογικό, φρένα

speech
ομιλία, λόγος, φωνή, λαλιά

ratio
αναλογία, λόγος, σχέση

word
λέξη, λόγος, είδηση

cause
αιτία, αίτιο, λόγος, υπόθεση, αφορμή, σκοπός

consideration
θεώρηση, μελέτη, αμοιβή, παράγοντας, λόγος, σεβασμός

oration
λόγος, αγόρευση, ρητό, δημηγορία

spiel
λόγος

It's a simple and good life, as the Cynic would tell you. — Wallows

Not only a Cynic might think so, but someone like Alexander the Great (perhaps a Cynic then). Anecdotally (or legendarily) he said to Diogenes after seeking the old dog out and getting an amusing response: 'If I weren't Alexander I'd want to be Diogenes.'

I thank Wallows for toughing it out in a tough world.

And to the moderators who put up with trespassers, migrants, tartuffes, feral cats and naughty boys and girls.

And to those who don't act in bad faith.

Amen.

I want to really learn a musical instrument (to cultivate any proficiency at music).

Also would like to understand some more basic physics in connection with doing home experiments:

1. Building a simple radio (receiving, transmitting, amplifying)
2. Photograph and experiment with Chaldni patterns.
3. Playing with object resonance (how to understand, determine or explain object resonance).

I think the resurrection refers to a metaphorical "second birth". Something akin to ego shattering and the possibility for a new orientation to life in which the Kingdom of God is now immanent (both interiorly and exteriorly). The self expands to incorporate the possibility of all beings as oneself (interchangeable with oneself). This doesn't mean things are all awesome, just that you're closer to recognizing the value of what the Buddha might term "right action" for the good of all beings.

Jesus' resurrection of course necessitated his death. For what are any of us willing to die? Of course we'd say we'd be more willing to make small sacrifices as a means to some end (for others for ourselves) but that isn't sufficient by Jesus' comparison given the degree to which we cling to our own lives (ie. we're all painfully attached to the world in its various manifestations).

A study of the notion of "sacrifice" through the ages might be an interesting pursuit to help shed light on the crucifixion/resurrection. Also I think the Buddha is in some way equivalent to Jesus, different historical manifestations of a similar root insight.

Cut back on the weed bro. — Jamesk

I'm sorry to hear that. One of the main reasons I abstain from smoking pot is due to not wanting to interfere with my dream recall. — Wallows

Haven't smoked weed in more than a decade. Don't jump to conclusions.

I stopped dreaming (or being able to recall them) along time ago.

Dreams used to be so great though. So stunningly brilliant and full of absurd enigma. Now we have movies to replace them.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things. — Zhuangzi

Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! — Zhuangzi

Jorge Luis Borges (an idealist master of meta narratives):

No one is interested in saving endangered species unless it is in some way lucrative. Very few GMO's belong to the public domain. Even if there are public domain GMOs, a lot of folks are scared of them.

Banana plants are a case where genetic modification is most important. Cavendish is the banana you know, is basically one genetically-locked cultivar (apart from ongoing mutation between populations). 99% of banana exports to wealthier nations are Cavendish. The Cavendish replaced the Gro Michel (supposedly better tasting) when a fungus knocked them out. The only way to save the Cavendish is probably through GMO. Fortunately there is no way a company can really patent it without enforcing patent rights, by engineering some kind of auto-destruct sequence into the plants (if this is possible). These bananas are grown through vegetative propagation only, like the scions of a graft (ex. Orange or Apple varieties), so it makes it easy to steal if such organisms become proprietary.

In Hawaii the papaya industry was saved by our State University by genetic modification. It was a gift to farmers. I'm not sure what the trick is to getting a truly organic papaya, that is how widespread the introduced gene is in populations. No one is going through the expense of testing to see which papayas carry the gene (though I could be totally wrong). The expense to farmers would be absurd since the industry is so small.

What endangered species needs to be saved? Biodiversity is like tool diversity, the more tools you have in your tool shed, the more stuff you can do.

I believe public GMOs (given to all peoples) are possibly a useful tool for retaining the planets biodiversity. The problem is one of incentive. Does anyone really care about the ancestors of the beloved apple?

The imminent death of the Cavendish banana

Zeno might wonder how you traverse between discrete links in a "chain of moments" .

But every time his wife told him to take out the trash, he'd reply. "How possibly could I traverse that infinite distance."