Comments

  • Changing Sex
    I personally do not believe trans people exist because I don't believe you can transition from one sex to another or one gender to another. I disapprove of people trying to make me believe they were either born in the wrong body, have changed sex, deserve to be treated as the opposite sex and a range of other beliefs under the trans umbrella. This the only ideology where people are allowed to try and force people into sharing someone else's mental states. — Andrew4Handel

    Do you happen to believe that gay people exist? Do you believe that it is possible to change sexual preference from the opposite gender to the same gender? Do you disapprove of people trying to make others believe that they're engaged in same-sex relationships? What do you think about forcing same-sex marriage ideology onto others?
  • Changing Sex
    ↪emancipate
    Apparently you've came to a conclusion that affirms your biases
  • Changing Sex
    ↪emancipate
    Tom Storm expressed support towards transgender people, and got criticized with a dumb argument that being transgender equals to a specific set of extreme examples. That's a gross generalization, and it's a clear example of inappropriate transphobia.

    I can't pretend to understand this phenomenon experientially but I can support (transgender) people and wish them the best. — Tom Storm

    You support thousands of young women including teenage girls having healthy breasts removed, the indoctrination of children, undermining women's rights, the existence of 100 genders and so on. — Andrew4Handel

    :100: — emancipate
  • Changing Sex
    This thread is an utter nonsense. People freely express their transphobic views, using extreme examples to make gross generalisations. Moderators engage in an argument instead of reinforcing the site guidelines:

    Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.

    People express negative attitudes towards the minorities. No one is unhappy about surgeons in general, or the government, or about straight people who endanger their bodies to accentuate their sex. Straight men ruin their bodies with steroids. Straight women overdo plastic surgeries and suffer from bulimia. No one has expressed their disapprovement of straight people, but the thread is filled with negative attitude towards transgenders. I'm disappointed in some forum members and even more so with the moderators who allow clear violations of the site guidelines to happen.
  • Very hard logic puzzle
    ofouro — sime

    ↪sime The smartest answer by far but something is still being missed. — DavidJohnson

    “ufourf”, perhaps?
  • Very hard logic puzzle
    How many different characters will you type to go to <3> from here? — DavidJohnson

    Does “different” mean “unique” here? Would aaa count as 1 or 3 characters?
  • Very hard logic puzzle
    ↪tim wood
    Ah, it says "different". Good catch. Back to the drawing board.
  • Very hard logic puzzle
    333 — pfirefry

    This is the only “logical” answer. First, we type 3 to answer the second question, then we type 3 to answer the first question, and then we type 3 to answer the first question.

    Here is a more detailed breakdown.
    Reveal

    What is the third character (number, letter, or symbol) you will type to solve this?

    How many different characters will you type to solve this?

    What is the first character you will type to solve this?     — DavidJohnson

    We start with three questions. We don't know the answers yet. I'll use the character '?' to mark unknown answers.

    ???

    Q1. The answer is unclear
    Q2. The answer is 3. There are three questions, and three characters to answer them
    Q3. The answer is unclear

    The only question we can answer right know is Q2. Let's go ahead and type the answer to it. According to the question, '3' is a valid character (number, letter, or symbol).

    ?3?

    Q1. The answer is unclear
    Q2. The answer is 3
    Q3. The first character that we typed to solve this was 3

    Now we have an answer to the question Q3. Let's go ahead and type it.

    ?33

    Q1. We know that answer to Q3 is 3. If we typed them in order 1-2-3, we would type it the last
    Q2. The answer is 3
    Q3. The answer is 3

    Now we know the answer to Q1. It's 3.

    333

    Let's double-check. The proposed answer is 333. First, we typed 3, then we typed 3, and then we typed 3.

    Q1. What is the third character (number, letter, or symbol) you will type to solve this? - 3
    Q2. How many different characters will you type to solve this? - 3
    Q3. What is the first character you will type to solve this? - 3

    Everything matches. The puzzle is solved.
  • Very hard logic puzzle
    333
  • Romance and Friendship: What's the difference
    Thus, there must be something about romantic relationships that doesn't have to do with sex that is distinct from friendship. — CallMeDirac

    True. That must be love. Intuitively, there is a big difference between friendship and love. Are you suggesting that there is no such difference?
  • Romance and Friendship: What's the difference
    yet asexual people can and do have romantic relationships — CallMeDirac

    How is it so? Is it a kind of intimacy that doesn't imply sexual arousal?
  • Is Pi an exact number?
    In practical calculations, Pi is never exact. It's is just computed to a given precision. In C++, the value of Pi is 3.14159265358979323846, which is sufficient for most calculations.
  • Changing Sex
    Please refer to me as King Andrew now or just your majesty because that is how I prefer to be referred to. I also am a real monarch because that is what my brain is telling me. I can't be wrong about my own intuitions. — Andrew4Handel

    You’re making a fool of yourself, and you should be ashamed. This argument has been used a million times and it remains incredibly ignorant. Seriously, I suggest you go educate yourself or at least stop whining.
  • (why we shouldn't have) Android Spouses
    ↪ToothyMaw
    Isn’t it true that the same can be said about auto-pilots in self driving cars? If one day Uber replaced all drivers with auto-pilots, you might be upset because you wouldn’t be able to have an interesting conversation with them and wouldn’t get pleasure from tipping them. But that day could still happen. There are always trade-offs. If someone is thinking about an android wife, they must be open to certain trade-offs, e.g. tickling or having conversations. If a certain android doesn’t meet your demands, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t exist and serve other’s needs. That’s something to be acknowledged.

    I’m just talking about this because otherwise the topic becomes very generic: Can a robot have a soul? Does a robot that gained consciousness have the same rights as a human?
  • (why we shouldn't have) Android Spouses
    ↪ToothyMaw
    Isn't it possible for an android to appease their human counterpart’s desire for romance/companionship without being conscious? A Korean man married a pillow once. The pillow didn't seem to be self-aware.
  • Changing Sex
    ↪Andrew4Handel
    There are plenty resources on the Internet. Feel free to educate yourself.
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    I was trying to see if I could challenge the following logic:

    Death is an immense harm to everyone. <...> How big? Well, you gage that by looking at how much harm you need to be suffering or prospectively suffering before it becomes rational to seek death. And the answer is: a lot of harm. — Bartricks

    Is it reasonable to measure the harm of death by the amount of suffering before it becomes rational to seek death? My point was that it isn't. When does it become rational to leave the restaurant? When we've been served shit, or when the course is over. When does it become rational to die? When we're facing a lot of harm and suffering, or when our bodies run out of life juice. It's possible to come to a restaurant, enjoy your meal and leave happily. So it should equally be possible to come into existence, enjoy your life, and die peacefully. As a result, it is not evident that death is an immense harm.
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    :lol:

    I did have a point, but I found it offensive that instead of addressing it you said: "Your point is irrelevant because it goes against my point, and my point is correct. Let's talk about my point and how I'm right." If these are the rules of the OP, then I'm not interested in participating.
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    Good luck with those horses!
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    Now you're repeating yourself without addressing my argument.

    So, first, we're at the restaurant whether we want to be or not. — Bartricks

    Relevance? Every time someone visits a restaurant for the first time they don't know whether they want to be there or not. That doesn't stop them from entering. Even if they are forced in the restaurant, they can still enjoy their meal.

    Second, we don't get to choose the courses — Bartricks

    Relevance? In restaurants we don't get to choose the menu and we don't get to cook. It doesn't stop us from going to restaurants and recommending them to our friends. Or do antinatalists argue that we should never go to restaurants?

    Third, everyone gets shit soup at the end. Everyone. Shit soup is death, remember? — Bartricks

    No, your initial argument was that departing from the restaurant was a better alternative to eating a ship soup, therefore you concluded that departure is roughly equal to a shit soup. But then I demonstrated that departure is not equal to being served a shit soup, and you agreed. So it was refuted that everyone gets shit soup at the end.

    Feel free not to respond to this commend if you have nothing to add. I'm not planning to re-iterate my argument.
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    Since it's possible to come into a restaurant, enjoy a meal and leave without facing anything disgusting, it should also be possible to come into life, enjoy what it has to offer and leave without being induced any major harm.

    In this analogy, a shit soup is a justifiable condition to leave the restaurant early, but the fact of leaving isn't necessarily equal to the experience of being served a shit soup. Similarly, unbearable suffering is a justifiable reason to die, but the death itself isn't necessarily equal to unbearable suffering.
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    Let’s say you go to a restaurant and order a course of five dishes. You’re planning to eat all of them, one after another. You can tolerate one or two bad dishes, but if the waiter serves you literally a shit soup, you will instantly walk out. Luckily, that doesn’t happen. You finish all five dishes and leave.

    At the end of the day, you ended up departing from the restaurant. Does any of these follow?

    • Departing from the restaurant was equal to eating a full bowl of shit soup
    • Departing from the restaurant was equal to being served a shit soup
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    That's a great post. You re-articulated your position well, and I feel that I understand it much better after reading it. Well done.
  • Is "no reason" ever an acceptable answer?
    Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Ether one of them always existed, or it spontaneously came into existence. There are no other options. What do you think happened?
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    So, my arguments - which you have not challenged - show that we're all going to hell — Bartricks

    That's one standpoint. It's not so hard to challenge. We're all going to heaven. We're all going to the place of peace and calm. We reunite with the nature. No matter how good your life is right now, it is going to end up spectacularly. The only thing is that there is no coming back once you're dead. Your existence (or non-existence) will be peaceful but you will no longer have anything to do with the Earth. You can exit at any time, but you won't be coming back. It's up to you how long you stay. You won't miss out on anything while you're staying here.

    My point is that the above wouldn't really change anything. Regardless of how people feel about their inevitable death, they are just currently immersed in their lives. They are not quitters. Not looking for an easy way out. That's what humans do.

    You can argue that if people anticipated heaven after death, they would give up more easily and welcomed death. Maybe that's true. But the same would apply if the opposite was true. If death would inevitably lead to hell, then people would just give up their lives and meet their inevitable death. The humanity would be done with. However, the reality is that no one knows if death is good or bad. They are just living their lives. If someone thinks that it's not so terrible to face the immanence of death, they will be inclined to procreate. That's what the majority does.

    I think this is as far as I can contribute to the discussion. I'm not expecting to comment more on this topic.
  • Should Whoopi Goldberg be censored?
    man's inhumanity towards man — Ree Zen

    What a gender-discriminatory thing to say!
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    ↪Bartricks
    Sorry, I'm not really following your argument. It seems to me that you have a small confusion about how things work, which leads you to arrive at great clams about antinatalism. It's not that the claims that you're making are illogical, but that the ground of the claims is a little shaky. I cannot point exactly at the gaps, but I'll share my thoughts.

    I addressed the possibility that death is harmful because of what it deprives us of and provided an apparent decisive refutation of it. — Bartricks

    I'm not sure what comments you're referring to. This thread has 6 pages. Although I tried to keep up and scrolled through all the pages, I cannot quickly tell what you're referring to. That's fine, because I think you're reiterating the refutation later in the same paragraph. I'll try to address them.

    Reveal
    Death is clearly something we have reason to avoid even when our lives are slightly miserable. — Bartricks

    Do you mean that our lives are slightly miserable in the moment, or do you mean in general? When I feel miserable, I have to remind myself that the feeling is temporary, and that there will be times in my life when I'll feel great. Why do we want to help people stuck in depression and having suicidal thoughts? Because we believe that this emotional state is temporary and it can be changed drastically given enough time and support.

    Death under those circumstances would not deprive you of anything worth having — Bartricks

    I don't see how this follows. If I'm feeling slightly miserable, I won't accept death as an answer, because it would deprive me of lots of things worth having in the future. I also anticipate that the time will come when I would like to choose death using rational thinking and not being influenced by an emotional state. I'd like to have personal freedom to make this choice. But I'm just speaking for myself. I wouldn't want other people to die, and I'm sure other people wouldn't want me to choose death. I'm talking about this choice as a matter of personal preference, because in the context of society there are lots of legal and bureaucratic pitfalls that hardly make it possible for society to function in the presence of this choice. Therefore, the topic of wilful death becomes a taboo.

    Thus its disvalue is not reflective of the positive value of life — Bartricks

    Sorry, I cannot understand this statement. It's a bit hard for me to absorb. I'll move on.

    Similarly, when in unending agony, we have reason to die - yet death is still the lesser of two evils under such circumstances — Bartricks

    So you're saying that death is the lesser of two evils? Which means that death is the best outcome, doesn't it? When life is an unending agony, then death deprives one of nothing worth having. But if we're slightly miserable, then there is a hope for a better life. In which case, death is a bad outcome because it would deprive us of a hope for a better life. Isn't it true? I feel that you're somehow disagreeing with what I'm saying. I'm saying that in rare circumstances when there is no hope, death is the best option, but most of the time there is enough hope to eliminate death as an option.

    So it is plainly implausible that the disvalue of death is a function of the value of life — Bartricks

    I'm also having hard times understanding this statement. Let me utilise the rule of double negation: implausible->plausible, disvalue->value. "It is plainly plausible that the value of death is a function of the value of life". Basically, one of the functions of the value of life is to add value to death. This should be a plausible statement. I still cannot wrap my head around it.

    Even when life here ceases to report a benefit profit, it remains rational to avoid death up until the harms of continued living become immense. — Bartricks

    It's a fun thing to say that life can report benefit profits. It's hard to measure the profits of life objectively. But let's say that we did this. We have a period with losses. How would this look like? Does it mean that after a year of my life I ended up more miserable than I was a year ago? Why should I care? Life goes up and down. Just the fact that sometimes it going down doesn't mean that we should end it instantly.

    I used an analogy of a loss making company. If the company - life plc - is recording a slight loss, year on year, you'd think it'd make sense to wind it up immediately. But your accountant tells you that that's not a good idea at all and that it is best to keep it running at a loss and only to wind it up if the losses become huge. What gives? What would be the rational inference to make? Surely that winding the company up will itself incur huge costs, - losses far greater than the losses you incur by keeping it running. — Bartricks

    That's a weird reference to make. In my life, I've read a few books about entrepreneurship and how to run a business, although I've never run one. If a company is making losses, I would expect the accountant to tell the CEO that it's not a good idea to keep it running. It's common for a company to have multiple departments, with one of them is making losses. I infer from the literature that it is the role of the CEO to make the hard decision to close that department for the benefit of the entire company.

    If there in anything we can infer from this analogy, it is that procreation is profitable. Look at the investor firms. The reality they're operating in is that 9 out of 10 startups they invest in will cease to exist, along with their money. But that 1 startup that eventually flies will cover the expenses of the 9 other startups for the investor. That's why it sucks to be a CEO. Essentially, you need to cover for the failures of 9 other startups to the investors. You can demonstrate an incredible growth, but the investors will still pressure you to grow even more to compensate for all their unsuccessful investments.


    That's what our reason says about us - the implication is that death itself is immensely harmful, so much so that it never makes sense to wind your life up until or unless continuing it will incur huge costs. — Bartricks

    I agree. But I wouldn't make an inference that we should stop procreating. I'm assuming that the main point of antinatalism is not that death is harmful, but that we shouldn't procreate. Death is harmful in the context of a living being. It's not as harmful in the context of procreation. It is more harmful to not procreate than to procreate and to cause death by it. Our reason tells us that life worth living despite death. Otherwise, we would end our lives immediately.
  • Holding that life after death exists makes me angry
    The reason is that it becomes an excuse for humans to put up with suffering and lower states of being. — Philosophim

    So the anger is about the people who put up with suffering and lower states of being, isn't it? What about them makes you angry? Is it that they don't try hard enough? Do you despise people stuck in lower states of being? What are the example of the "lower states of being" that make you angry?

    Are there examples of people who believe in life after death but don't use this as an excuse to put up with lower states of being? Do these people make you angry?

    Why would people stop putting up with suffering and lower states of being if they didn't believe in life after death? Wouldn't it become another excuse? "I'll be dead anyways. Nothing that I do now will matter when I'm gone. I'll just do whatever feels good." Wouldn't you feel angry about the people that say this?

    When I listen to those who have accomplished great things in life, be it financial, ethical, or personal goal oriented, I rarely here, "I did it because I know there's life after death." — Philosophim

    How often do you hear "I did it because nothing matters after I die"? I don't hear this much often. Although, it does ring a bell. Après moi, le déluge. This expression is generally regarded as a nihilistic expression of indifference to whatever happens after one is gone. Can you offer a reason why anyone should care about how they live their life if nothing matters after they die?

    Further, I find the idea of life after death the ultimate in arrogance and hubris. — Philosophim

    I agree, it does seem uninformed and unsupported by evidence. But why being mad about it? I find the idea of being angry at others a sign of arrogance and hubris. What gives you the right to be angry at others? You don't seem apologetic about your anger. This starts making me angry. But then I'm able to defuse my anger. I don't have any reasons to have strong feeling about you or the OP.

    Death is frustrating. People holding unreasonable believes is frustrating. Not being able to change other people's mind is frustrating. Being frustrated about many things is frustrating. I find empathy and philosophy to be good tools to defuse anger.
  • Antinatalism and the harmfulness of death
    It seems clear that death is inevitable for anyone living here. And it seems equally clear that death is a considerable harm. Our reason tells us to do virtually anything to avoid it. If avoiding it means sawing your arm off, reason recommends doing that. — Bartricks

    This is true. Our reasons tell us to do virtually anything to avoid death. You're suggesting that we should listen to our reasons. That's what we do. Our reasons also tell us that procreation in spite of death is still better than no procreation at all. Although your argument is carefully crafted, our reasons still tell us that we should procreate. Your argument heavily relies on us trusting our reason. This makes it hard for you to argue that we should stop listening to the reason that tells us to procreate in spite of death.

    Here are some of the obvious objections to the OP:

    • The only reason death is harmful is because life is sacred. Even a short period of miserable life is more valuable than instant death. This means that procreation creates more value than harm.
    • Although death is harmful, there are no reasons to believe that the harm of death outweighs the value of life. It's not clear why someone living and dying would leave the world in a worse state than if the person never existed.
    • As much as death is harmful for an individual, it is even more harmful for a species. If we have a choice between dying as a species and procreating, our reason tells us that we should avoid the death of species. It is more harmful to inflict death on humanity by not procreating than to procreate.

    I think there are better arguments for antinatalism than the harm of death. I would expect them to be about the misery of life. If life is generally miserable and meaningless, then it doesn't make sense to bring new people to it. But if life is great and only death is harmful, then it's not clear why the immanence of death would necessarily outweigh the benefits of life.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    Maybe that's why we aren't seeing other living creatures around us
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    ↪Cornwell1
    Yeah, nah. They're living many light years away from you. You'll be dead by the time you can see them and the divergence.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    ↪Cornwell1
    Yeah, if you're living near the edge, you will see different things outside. But if you're living in the middle, you will see the same thing.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    ↪Cornwell1
    One at position (x0, y0), and the second at a different position (x1, y1). Everything in the observable radius R around these points is identical. Things outside the radius R can diverge.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    ↪Cornwell1
    I'm assuming that both the volumes and their observable surroundings are identical. That seems far-fetched, but not impossible in an infinite universe. I'm also assuming that the volume and its observable surroundings have a finite age. This way, the surroundings that I'm observing have not been 'observably' impacted by their surroundings. They may have been impacted in the present, but I'm only seeing their past when they haven't been impacted yet. Given sufficient time, the surroundings will change and our exact copies will diverge.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    This suggests that only one Universe exists and what you are about to describe are possible limitations for any lifeform living within it, yes? — universeness

    Yeah, I'm talking about the single infinite 3D universe introduced in the OP: "In an infinite universe <...>". I think you contributed with the idea of a 4D space with many 3D universes, but for the purpose of the OP I'm assuming a single infinite 3D universe. I'm also assuming that the universe has a finite age and it's expanding similar to our universe. The finite age allows us to consider the regions of the infinite universe so far removed from each other that there is there no way for them to interact with one another. If they sent beams of light towards each other at the moment of the Big Bang, the light wouldn't have reached the destination by today. I'm just trying to play by the Tegmark's rules. Personally, I don't find the idea of infinity very realistic. I'm also subscribed to the idea of isolated pockets of the universe, most of which I know from this video. This sets the ground for a multiverse within a 3D universe.

    It was super dense 14 billion years ago, but since then it has risen just enough for us to start making cookies.
    — pfirefry

    So we could call this state the singularity, yes?     — universeness

    Exactly. I'm assuming that singularity was uniform. When the universe started expanding, the areas of space appeared everywhere at the same time, so that space was already infinitely large the moment it appeared.

    14 billion years ago we drew a small circle on that dough, and this circle has been expanding with the dough this entire time
    — pfirefry

    So our current observable/detectable 'section' of this one Universe you posit.     — universeness

    Not exactly. I'm trying to outline the observer here. We can observe the universe from a single point in space, but it's hard to fit a person or a copy of a person into one point. It's also hard to reason whether two points can be exact copies of each other, since a point doesn't have volume. Instead, I'm allocating a chunk of space in which an observer will exist. This area of space can be the size of our observer, or our planet, or our galaxy. Arbitrarily, I chose the size of a Hubble volume to connect with the OP. I will introduce the second circle to outline the observable/detectable 'section' of the universe, where the first circle acts as the observer.

    So we now have a section of the Universe that expands faster than our section. — universeness

    Yeah, that's when my metaphor starts breaking down. I stared with one circle in mind, but I then realised that I needed two. The first circle represents spacial boundaries, but things can move within space at the speed of light. So the second circle is the horizon of information that travels through space. Coming back to our dough metaphor, let's say that yeast bacteria is living inside the dough. It can travel through the dough over time, regardless of its expansion. The second circle represents how far the bacteria could have gotten in 14 billion of years while traveling through the expanding dough

    In my head, this would be the same idea as one of my organs moving faster than the rest of my body was running. Ouch! — universeness

    The first circle is the boundary of your heart. But the second circle represents a wave produced by a heart beat, travelling outside of your body and expanding over time. If someone in another galaxy sent an impulse to impact your heart, the moment your heat beat reaches them is the moment their impulse reaches you. The wave produced by your first heartbeat outlines the area of the universe that can impact your heart, assuming that nothing existed before the heartbeat happened.

    Sorry, I'm not sure my explanation holds together well at this point. I have a very specific idea of what happened at the time of the Big Bang, but I'm not sure that I can articulate it, or that anyone can grasp it just from my description.

    So what did this cookie expand into? would it not crunch against its surrounding slower moving dough?
    Does each cookie create a new layer to the Universe depending on its expansion rate?     — universeness

    It just expands because new space appears for it to expand into. New bubbles of space are forming in the dough, while no new dough is being created. We don't know where the space is coming from, but we know that it just appears and it causes the expansion of dough. It's not important where the space is coming from for the purpose of the OP.

    I think the idea of layers is the result of attempting to look at the Universe from the 4D point of view. I don't want to disregard this view. I think it's interesting, and I'd like to give it a go. But as far as my analogy goes, I'm not concerned about what the "outside" of the universe looks like, or how the universe is arranged in a higher-dimensional space. I think that's consistent with Tegmark.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    ↪Cornwell1
    Alright, my post about the library was "lazy", because I didn't give much thought to the OP. I referenced a similar problem without further explanation. To summarise the Library of Babel,
    Reveal
    there is a finite number of 410-page books that we can write. In a universe with an infinite number of 410-page books, it's guaranteed that some of the books will be the exact copies of each other. However, it doesn't mean that all books will have more than one copy. Some books may be absent, and some books can appear only once.


    Now that I took extra time to think about the point made in the OP about the interaction between Hubble volumes, I think I came to a conclusion. It was a fun exercise thinking about this, and I'm sure you will be able to figure this out, and you'll enjoy the experience. I have two metaphors for this.

    Let's say the Universe is an infinite sheet of cookie dough. It was super dense 14 billion years ago, but since then it has risen just enough for us to start making cookies. It so happened that exactly 14 billion years ago we drew a small circle on that dough, and this circle has been expanding with the dough this entire time. Besides that, there is a second circle that initially was equal to the first circle, but its expansion was at the speed of light. We know that dough expands slower than the speed of light, so the second circle ended up being larger than the first one. Within the inner circle is out cookie (Hubble volume). Within the outer circle is all the dough that has ever interacted with the cookie (Particle horizon). Outside of the outer circle is the rest of the dough. We cut our cookie out of the dough, dispose of its surrounding dough, and then we repeat this process again in a new location on our infinite sheet. We end up with an infinite number of cookies that have never interacted with each other in 14 billion years. Moreover, no two cookies have ever interacted with the same piece of dough. The cookies are so far apart that they could have came from different Universes. If we assume that within a finite area of the dough there can only exist a finite number of arrangements of particles that make up the dough, then some cookies will have multiple copies inside an infinite jar. It can also happen that the cookie that we live in is unique, or that an infinite number of possible cookies can exist within a finite area of the dough, which would mean that no two cookies are unique.

    My second metaphor is the following. Let's say that you're standing in a line of people that are one light year apart from each other (socially distancing). When you're looking at the person next to you, you see them 1 year younger than they actually are. This is because the light from them had to travel one year to reach you. In this example, all people in the line have the same age, because they were all borne at the time of Big Bang. Then, you look at the person next to your neighbour. This person is now 2 years younger than you. You keep looking farther and farther, and you keep noticing people getting younger, until you reach a 1 year old baby, and there is no one beyond the baby. It's not that this is the end of the line, but this is the horizon of your vision. You know that there are more people out there, but you just haven't got a chance receive any light from them. Now, here is something interesting. The one-year-old baby that you're seeing is actually a full grown woman. You just don't know it yet. At the same moment that you're looking at the baby version of her, she is looking far ahead and seeing many more people in the line. The baby version of her hasn't registered any people at all, so you have no way to learn about other people in the line beyond her. You never know. There may be someone in the line far away that is an exact copy of you. It can even be that the baby that you're looking at is a copy of yourself.
  • Tegmark's type I multiverse. Can there be exact copies of you or me? I think so!
    ↪Cornwell1
    In the Library of Babel, there is a book that contains a precise description of your, your past and your future. It provides details of what will happen to you tomorrow. And the library is not even infinitely big.

    Perhaps if you understand how the library works, you will also see how under certain conditions there can be exact copies of yourself.
  • Pragmatic epistemology
    What part of this proposition, "Neil Armstrong is the first human to walk on the Moon.", is subjectively true and which part is objectively true? — Harry Hindu

    It is an exercise for you to answer. I'll leave my thoughts below.

    Reveal
    • The proposition is not true in the sense that you cannot prove it to be absolutely true. No matter how hard you try, a skeptic will find a way to question this proposition. Maybe Apollo 11 was fabricated; Buzz Aldrin was technically the first one to meet the criteria of walking; perhaps Neil Armstrong wasn't a human; someone had done this before Neil and kept it in secret; and so on.
    • The proposition is objectively true in the sense that you're referring to a specific event that objectively happened.
    • The proposition is subjectively true in the sense that it is grounded in your subjective assumptions. You're referring to a specific Neil Armstrong and not any other person with the same name. You're referring to a specific moon. You have a specific idea of what it means to walk on the Moon, in oppose to stepping on a lunar meteorite found on Earth, standing barefoot on a celestial body, or perhaps walking all the way from Earth to the Moon on foot.


    If every truth possesses the quality of subjectivity then you don't get to say that I'm wrong, or that what I'm saying isn't the case. You can and I can believe in completely opposite things and we would both be correct and no one would ever be wrong, or what we believe would always be the case, which is just nonsense. — Harry Hindu

    Exactly. Dealing with nonsense can be fun, but sometimes we want to escape it, so we need an epistemology that doesn't lead to nonsense. That's where pragmatism comes from. Looking at the problem pragmatically, it doesn't matter whether the proposition "Neil Armstrong is the first human to walk on the Moon" is objectively and undeniably true. What matters is whether the proposition is useful in a given situation or not.
  • God Exists, Relatively Speaking
    Finally, a solution to the Great Filter. The humanity is saved for today.
  • Pragmatic epistemology
    Propositions can be true and we don't know it. It is either true that "Every truth is subjective." or it is true that "Every truth is not subjective". One of those statements must be true and one must be false. Both cannot be true. — Harry Hindu

    I don't see why this should be the case. Every truth is both subjective and objective. There is objectivity in each truth, and there is an element of subjectivity in truth as well.
Home » pfirefry