. I have a very fickle mind. — Athena

This is the modern malaise most young people also understand, given the roulette wheels of fleeting pleasures available at our finger tips. If AI can help sustain attention/commitment to the working topic, to dig in rather than just glide over the surface and onto the next thing, it surely is useful. But as folks have said, is it just another modern crutch that makes us weak and dependent and not very good, logical thinkers.

However, we may all be concerned about our economy being tied to AI. — Athena

Recently I saw headlines that ChatGPT data can be handed over to the police, as algorithms may detect those who are about to commit a crime. We're definitely living in a sci-fi novel now, much like the Minority Report, except the precogs (those that see us better than we see ourselves) are machine learning networks controlled by private businesses. The abuse of control over people lives, from power/wealth incentives, is worrisome, especially with the political climate now in the USA.

Also if these big data companies are reliant on advertising for their business model, and LLM search inquiries are bypassing advertisements; what do they stand to gain by doing that? When will LLM content start sneaking in advertisements to its free/base tier service, like all of the video/music streaming services have done, increasingly so.

Beauty is subjective, not objective. — DifferentiatingEgg

Maybe we could also introduce inter-subjectivity to this scheme, insofar that people can share a consensus about what things are beautiful or what things ought to be beautiful. If the world annihilates itself in time, if it is forever in flux, inaccessible in its momentary specificity or wholeness, then the world is never to be properly objectified. Objectivity is a transient and relative concern between a group of subjects, mapping a relevant territory among territories, as a means to many potential (unknown) ends.

So no one here cares about my thread about the great depression, and that is easy to accept. — Athena

There are a lot of threads that seem to die out pretty quickly. It isn't so much that people don't care as they mayn not have the competence, knowledge or will to critique the subject and its responders. LLM/AI could make participation easier as it removes the friction/work of sharing analysis.

The prohibition here does make me feel bad about my own LLM use as if I'm doing something wrong. But I suppose it is less bad than losing myself in mindless entertainment, like video games. A lot of folks here critique popular culture, in an off handed way, as something awful, as if it was competing antagonist for their more ambitious aims (self edification through discourse). The forum no doubt plays an important social function for some people, which for others the consumption of media/books/television tries to fill.

We could look at LLM as a synergistic element, in the sense that two minds are better than one, when one mind cannot receive sufficient feedback from another. Of course it is wrong to consider LLM a mind, but insofar as it can produce the illusion of a mind as output, it can assist a real mind/person in trying to make sense of the world.

:joke: I'm very disappointed that forum users don't use horses instead of cars to get to work. They/we could learn something about hard work from the Amish.

Or all philosophical exchanges should be done by embodied oration, in a public forum.

:joke:

That said, roughly speaking, yes. That's right. — AmadeusD

Mental training can go a long way but who helped you to help yourself in this way? Why aren't you a meth addict now, half dead in gutter, or a neurotic incel living in your mother's basement? Maybe it is just that you made all the good choices in your life so your competence proves your worth.

Your idea that person who feels offended should look deeply into his/her reaction is very important and valuable insight. It reminds me of the narrative of the Buddha as he stands against Mara (the forces of his own craving and aversion, as existential temptations and fears). He immune to the offense of Mara, which springs from his being as delusion/ignorance. But he is ready to defend himself against a real threat, for sure, if he wants to continue to teach, pet dogs and eat mangoes.

But I think it is best that we do...(help people)

Well, you said it. I think it is best that we do help people, but we don't always know how to help people help themselves. Even if we know what we ought to do where does the will come from to do it, if not fear. Fear is the slave driver of human kind, it has great utility as motivation, but if it's excessive and unreasonable one can easily be destroyed by it, or rendered stupid.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” — Frank Herbert, Dune

At some stage, we need to stop throwing money and accommodations at those people, I think. — AmadeusD

Natural selection is God's tough love, I guess. If a bird is too stupid, lazy, afraid or overworked to put a roof over its nest and secure it with anchor straps does it deserve to lose its young when the wind blows?

Modern conditions are objectively better than essentially any previous period in history other than perhaps the late 90s. — AmadeusD

In materialistic terms this is likely true but in psychological terms, possibly not. We're facing a loneliness/despair epidemic in the US. A lot of people are mentally not doing so great. It's all well and great to say people ought to control their emotions, and anyone can start, but who is going to help them do that? Though maybe that's not your concern or your point. Does a moral obligation spring from your argument/philosophy to help others to help themselves, if there is any normative prescription that passes from it.

People ought to do X. Who will do Y, M, L and Z, in order for people to facilitate/achieve X.

Or do we just say people ought to do X.

To someone who cannot control their emotions, of course it would. If you feel you're being asked to do something impossible, it will sound both callous and irrational. But I have empirical evidence that this is not so... People do this all the time. — AmadeusD

I can't get the guy I work with to wear closed toed shoes or come in at a specific time, even though he lives across the street. He actually almost died from getting a foot infection while working outside, which he could've avoided if he had just worn his shoes when doing physical labor. Think he was slapped with a $10,000 bill for intravenous antibiotics. He doesn't know how to or doesn't want to go through the trouble to pay his taxes. I value him as a friend though so I can't whip him into shape without making myself out to be an asshole. He is a charming human being despite all his faults.

Even capable/competent people are breaking under modern conditions. The stress of our lifestyles actually undermines the ability for people to control their emotions by virtue/vice of the "monkey see monkey do" and "tit for tat" phenomena. Chronic stress in childhood undermines the ability of emotional control in adult life.

beautification by minimization or (simplification) — Outlander

I'm not so sure about foot binding in relation to this idea of simplicity/minimization but it certainly is very relevant/plausible. I think the kind of fitness that foot binding signals is as much the willingness to conform in service of organizational harmony, to participate in the culture, to tow the line. It takes resources/work to bind feet, in addition to everything else one needs to do in life.

I thought about trying to learn throw pottery. But slip caste cups and bowls, the kind you buy a the store, are so perfect and lightweight, the printed designs visually outstanding (Japanese bowls in particular). Potters' mugs seem to suffer from a kind of rustic bulkiness, both in clay content and glaze thickness, which makes them less comfortable to use and heavier.

So I prefer the simplicity/utility/refinement/lightness/consistency/design of industry over the average functional hand made pottery you might encounter. I enjoy what I see in excellent pottery but I don't want to keep that pottery. So why fire pots if I don't know what to do with them.

Another word to add to simplicity/minimization is organization/utility. Maybe they suggest the same thing. A simple thing is an organized thing, such that it remains familiar, stable, and thereby comfortably/predictably functional. A beautiful house is often a well organized one. A beautiful friend often resembles him/herself.

Beauty is not the same thing as physical attractiveness. — Outlander

Most people have a sense of this, if you were to ask them. But our sense for what is beautiful is still an artifact of natural selection, if not sexual selection, which I guess isn't saying much. Beauty is both about physical attractiveness and not about physical attractiveness.

It's also about comfort, enjoyment/pleasure and whatever else a philosopher might say about it. :flower: :chin:

Beauty is... Conformity. — Outlander

If you weren't put off with someone who's face was deformed — Outlander

A deformity could become a culturally pressured/desirable modification, like with Chinese foot binding. It is a mutilation that goes beyond the superficial cosmetic, causing great pain and disability with the potential for other health problems. I wonder if in bed, uncovered, Chinese men of the time ever found these deformed feet to be a powerfully erotic sexual fetish. Or do the pretty shoes stay on?

It has been estimated that by the 19th century 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% among upper-class Han Chinese women. — Wikipedia: Foot binding

One could imagine the tragedy of this handicap forcing itself downward through lower social classes, where a woman's ability to do domestic work is limited by pain. Say your peasant parents decide to bind your feet but then you are also still pressured to carry out daily duties suited to normal functioning feet. At least you can console yourself with the belief that your feet are either beautiful or sexy...

First, while some can try to appear "deeper" by declaring that in their opinion human "beauty" goes well beyond what an eye can see — LuckyR

Well, any combination of desirable traits can synergize with the image to make lust more potent.

One can suddenly desire a person by image alone and in the next minute, in the course of discovering new properties/traits, be disgusted or craving can be magnified by learning what they enjoy and their peculiar mannerisms.

What is strange about beauty is how such small features can magnify it. Like how a single earring, say the Christian cross, might be symbolic of an entire domain of meaning, and what kind of work that does in context of other signs of what a person might be like.

Say there are two gorgeous young men, of equal physical beauty, one wearing a Christian cross earring and one wearing a Swastika earring. Don't the meanings of those symbols in some cases go to work on whether or not we find them beautiful at a glance? But even the man wearing the Christian cross is subject to an investigation regarding what kind of Christian he is... Do fundamentalist Christian men, quick to prejudice and full of dogma, wear earrings? Our prejudicial response of disgust is a condition that modifies the object of beauty.

When a women gets buccal fat removal we may find it off putting. Plastic surgery, if we can tell it has been done, may invoke disgust if we think the person is visually less appealing than they were before. It does the opposite of what it intends, insofar as it might tell something of the internal state of the person, their insecurity/fear/concerns.

Body builders, of the the kind that followed Arnold Schwarzenegger lead, in maximizing mass of muscle are nowhere near as beautiful as Michael Angelo's David. But many might share the opposite opinion.

All kinds of behaviors/signs, insofar as they help us make an inference about character, go to work on whether or not we find a person attractive.

Offense does not exist in a word, or a phrase, or in saying something. It exists, solely, in the mind of hte offended person. It's not been 'taken in' from without. That's the claim, and I would appreciate treating it as such. — AmadeusD

I suppose this is also true of many physical acts that give rise to an offense. If I slap one on the face, the pain/sensation as well as the offense exists solely in the mind of the receiving person. The pain itself doesn't constitute that the slap is offensive, rather the perceived insult or annoyance felt by the slapped person. Even in the case of a physical slap, the offense has not been 'taken in' from without because the offense is about the perceived meaning of the act, which comes from somewhere else.

Is this right?

The offense exists solely, and inarguably, in your reaction. — AmadeusD

This is a normative recommendation. Your saying it ought to be the case that we treat offense as if it is solely the responsibility of the receiver. We'd have better control over ourselves if we could pause and not reciprocate the bait of an insult, whatever the intention behind it, and escalate a loss of self control in ourselves.

"Sticks and stones will break my bones by words will never hurt me." Oh but they do hurt, since we are not so disciplined to be be immune to the effect they might otherwise have on us.

Try to explain to your mom that she is totally responsible for her reaction when you call her an "ugly bitch". No one knows if you meant to be offensive. You gave no offense (because you can't). She took offense. It was an empirical test, which yielded some data. Now you just need to train your mom to accept that she carries the responsibility for her reactions every time you insult her.

Quite often, social media users will be caused to be offended by something which was not aimed at them, isn't reasonably readable that way, and ultimately has nothing to do with them. It caused their offense, but the offense wasn't in any way attached to the cause. — AmadeusD

This is definitely true, I'll give you that.

You can simply intend that the person becomes offended - given this routinely fails, it is obvious that there is no offense in the utterance. — AmadeusD

But it also routinely succeeds. You suggest that all the victims of verbal abuse choose to be victims of verbal abuse. It sounds incredibly callous and something most folks would not agree with, to make the victim shoulder all the responsibility of the effects of verbal abuse. And even if it ought to be the case doesn't mean that it is the case. It's a normative prescription.

Beauty is a sign of fitness in evolutionary biology, so we if aren't limited to just the visual, it could extend to what attracts us to the deeper features of a person's character also. A person who is physically attractive, charming, competent, kind and knowledgeable is more beautiful than a conceited and self-absorbed or mentally ill gorgeous youth. The more aspects of beauty one retains, the more desirable one might be. Society stratifies along these lines, the elite match the elite and the rabble match the rabble, which perpetuate class subcultures and resentments between them.

A person's wealth (generation) is also a general measure of fitness, which has always played a huge role in culturally/biologically mediated mate choice. Watch Game of Thrones or Downton Abby or wild horses on the plains of Nebraska. The allure of muscle is a sign of the utility of muscle.

Deep beauty is as much a tyranny as superficial beauty, insofar as what is given is so often unfair in relation to what we naturally desire or are taught desire.

Beauty may be ultimately an expression and sign of power, or the promise/allure of the enhancement of one's power by association, whether it was dispensed by nature or achieved by merit.

Point is the whole framework of racial superiority is independent of actions, character and morals — boethius

Don't you think ethnocentrism is maybe a better term than racism for your thesis. Racism emerges more a symptom of thinking one's culture/ideology/class/religious identity is superior to another and then differentiating members by superficial physical features.

Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. — William G Sumner

We'd still treat others like crap if we we're all racially homogeneous by resorting other to means of questionable/unfair in-group out-group differentiation, even if that includes differentiation on the basis of actions, character and morals.

I think scissors only become scissors when connected by that fulcrum, and when independent and disconnected, they’re simply blades. — flannel jesus

You're supposed to just accept that his hands are functioning scissors and not to delve too deeply into how the prop functions.

This would be excellent content for Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, since he loves functional movie props. An close up inspection of how they work and the possibility of fabricating true scissor hands would be right up his alley.

If we're willing to do it we can produce a societal system that's far more harmonious than the current system. — Barkon

As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The moral aspiration behind communism produced a lot of failed states, both domestic and international conflicts/tragedies . Breaking apart the status quo by any meaningful degree with an ideal picture of how things ought to be risks instability and possibly greater harms. No one could come to agreement about the details of the system which we should strive for. There would always be a war between the majority rule and the minority dissent.

There should be no suffering and no forced sacrifices. — Barkon

In other words, we shouldn't exist as we are at all.

The needs and desires of humans, as individual and group pursuits yield their consequence in mass, may be in the long term anti-life-force. If our actions are unintentionally driving us toward our own and other's extinction, yet locally we consider them moral relative to our culture's demands, maybe we need a higher/universal vantage point for our moral aspirations.

But this could be an impossible or impractical project. You can reason to yourself about what you ought to do, but what makes you do what you ought to do is often just local moral pressure, the fear of being excluded, shamed or punished by your peers for wrong conduct.

AI

AI LLMs are not to be used to write posts either in full or in part (unless there is some obvious reason to do so, e.g. an LLM discussion thread where use is explicitly declared). Those suspected of breaking this rule will receive a warning and potentially a ban.

AI LLMs may be used to proofread pre-written posts, but if this results in you being suspected of using them to write posts, that is a risk you run. We recommend that you do not use them at all. — TPF Site Guidlines

We can use AI to clarify/explore ideas to ourselves, it's just recommended that we don't use them at all.

There is a huge problem of trust with LLMs. If you ask a complicated question you don't know the answer to, you don't know whether the answer is complete bullshit. I asked for a summary of some Chapters of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and it gave me wrong garbage. It should of said upfront that it couldn't because it doesn't have access to the text.

LLM's are just more fuel for eroding trust in information in our post truth era.

Superficial beauty is often just about what triggers sexual lust, which is a hugely powerful instinctive force.

The flaccid noodle becomes a turgid rod and the desire inside you aches for the fantasy some passing image creates.

That still dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe, but is utterly dominated by the number of random texts. If the number of possible books was represented by all the atoms in the universe, the number of coherent books would be far, far, far, far less than one atom's worth! — hypericin

:up:

Good luck on gaining any insight into your original problem. Let me know when you've figured it out. :sweat:

@hypericin

On average the number of unique words used only once in any written work is 40-60%. This is a problem for translators if they don't have other works in which the same words appear to help them infer meaning.

An interesting easy exercise would be to scrub any book of its hapax legomena (unique words that appear only once) and see how much meaning is lost for the reader. How much work does the remaining context do to interpret the missing 40-60%?

If the alien codex was actually a version of English gibberish with fine sytnax and was entirely original (had no other copy or translation on Earth), even with a known sentence with incontrovertible meaning, I still believe it's fully untranslatable. The ratio of known meaning to unknown is really vital to the possibility of deciphering/translating language.

J.L. Borges wrote a story inspired by the thought experiment of the set of all possible books given a certain text length and symbol set. The combination output exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the universe and that can easily grow (exponentially) by increasing the length of text and symbol set. I've always wanted to know about specific qualitative sets within the space of all possible books given those stipulations. Using the English alphabet, what percent of the set of all possible books would be complete and comprehensible for any reader today? These question is unanswerable but I intuit the proportion is tiny, maybe the number of atoms in the solar system or galaxy out of the number of atoms in the universe. The mystery makes for an itch that can't be scratched.

How big would be set of the translation variants of Moby Dick in English? Can we replace the whale with a small land animal and consider it a variant of Moby Dick?

If that conscious periphery gave us enough information about the body I’m sure consciousness wouldn’t be a such a mystery — NOS4A2

I don't understand what you're getting at here. As if a person had thousands of diagnostic lights on their phenomenal user interface, where the pancreas can call up the conscious user to say 85% of the insulin cells are off line, why would that make consciousness less of a mystery?

One can imagine a future of augmented reality, where everything we need to know about what is happening in our body occurs to us. The sky isn't the limit in this regard. But maybe we wouldn't know what kinds of new experience this technology of networks could be giving rise to.

Think Maw is just considering translation from an insufficient sample of text with known (incontrovertible) meaning.

The Rosetta stone would probably be an interesting case to read up on. Modern day Coptic was a vital source for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics because of the strong phonetic correspondences between the two languages. If they had the Rosetta stone but spoken Coptic was extinct, would they still be able to crack the hieroglyphics? Possibly not. Coptic furnishes most of the clues to reconstructing the meaning that the Rosetta stone translation does not contain.

Trying to reconstruct a foreign dictionary with just a handful of entries sounds impossible and absurd, as would be finding meaning in the alien codex.

I guess I'm still confused as to why one would make the assumption of incontrovertible meaning.

Suppose there are 10 different civilizations similar to ours in their intelligence/knowledge/life, that all receive the same hoax codex, and the syntactical nature of the codex serves perfectly as any language emptied of original meaning might. Each of these civilizations go to work at imposing meaning onto the script in a way that achieves a compelling level of coherence such that they have, in their expert opinion, reached a stage of incontrovertible meaning, which really just means they've achieved a remarkable coherence/intelligibility that seems indisputable.

What is the likelihood that the meaning of these 10 different efforts in different parts of the universe yield the same understanding? My intuition is that every completed codex would be radically different in meaning, yet perfectly intelligible and complete. The attitude that forms as to why the text's meaning is incontrovertible comes simply from the fact that it is way too difficult to try again afresh on any planet. Therefore there is no absolute incontrovertible meaning of any version, except with regard to all the work already done. It is only deemed incontrovertible because the meaning created "out of whole cloth" works but that fails to take in mind what else could work.

Is there any way we can ground our speculation as to whether there are many possible perfect impositions of meaning of or just a few or only one that works for the codex?

That is to say that if we could, across the distribution of meanings the codex could take on, narrow down the likelihoods of certain interpretations over others, there is probably one that is most likely — ToothyMaw

The likelihood of arriving at one meaning might be a consequence of how difficult it is to make the codex coherent though. If you had the set of all possible coherent meanings, which might be numerically staggering, what exactly would help you to pick the "one that is most likely"?

So yes, given enough time and computing power, a meaning can be imposed on the codex, I think. — ToothyMaw

Couldn't it be possible that there are actually hundreds to billions of variations of meaning that can be imposed on the codex that satisfy the level of coherence hypericin/humanity is looking for. If this was known to be the likelihood, the meaning of any can be disputed within/against that set of all possibilities. What exactly makes the manufactured meaning of the text incontrovertible? Are we assuming only one meaning can fit the codex?

Humanity must assume that the codex has a single, incontrovertible meaning. — hypericin

I don't understand this assumption. Does every novel have a single incontrovertible meaning? Take for instance idioms/metaphors, which bring forth the issue/conflict of literal versus figurative meanings. Both the following passages are coherent on two levels (?), but they have two different meanings based on whether or not you have knowledge of what the idiomatic content actually means.

I decided to bite the bullet and hit the road early, hoping to beat the clock, but when push came to shove, traffic was a whole different ball game. By the time I made it to the office, I was running on fumes, yet I still had to jump through hoops to get the project off the ground. At the end of the day, though, we pulled it off by the skin of our teeth. — ChatGPT paragraph in Idioms

It gets even more bizarre if you translate foreign idioms:

I woke up feeling like I had an octopus on my face, but I decided to tie my stomach and head to work. The meeting was chaos — everyone was watering their salad while the boss was trying to give birth to a mountain. When it was my turn to speak, I almost dropped my face, but somehow I managed to hang noodles on everyone’s ears. By the end, we were all pressing the cucumber, pretending everything was fine. — ChatGPT paragraph in foreign idioms

If alien codex were an idiomatic prank that was deciphered at a literal level, the meaning would still be lost. This would be compounded by the gulf between what is universal between species and what is hopelessly local and perhaps untranslatable.

There is a lot of structure and repetition in a language, whereas noise has none. — hypericin

But your alien text has structure and repetition, plausibly functions like a language as a carrier of information, like the Voynich manuscript. Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting to the experts.

If I was sitting in a classroom in which everyone was talking and I was trying to understand what the lecturer was saying over other discussions, the unwanted interference of other coherent conversations could be considered noise, even if the only thing I could understand was the very thing I didn't want to listen to (the noise).

Noise is relative to the receiver, as what interferes in the transmission/reception of a message. A concern for random noise (if that is how you are defining it) isn't that relevant to your hypothetical text because if it looked like random noise to begin with no one would consider whether it could carry meaning.

It is complete nonsense, random gibberish, imbued with enough regularity to look like a plausible language, but no more. — hypericin

With respect to using the text as the basis for the creation of a language, which could possibly make original text arbitrarily coherent in some new meaning, the syntactical/structural content is all that matters. The semantic content is gibberish (or lost) but the syntactic content could be useful and is not random.

In any case, we could use a machine learning expert who is also a linguist to weigh in.

The question is this: given enough time and computing power, can humanity eventually "discover" an interpretation that renders the text coherent? While in truth, inventing one out of whole cloth? Or will the text remain indecipherable forever? — hypericin

Isn't imposing a false meaning on the text achievable with a considerable bit of work? It's just mapping a known language/meaning onto a novel set of symbols. The text could probably serve as code for innumerable different meanings. I guess it really depends on the patterns/regularities of the text in question.

It is not possible to derive a message from noise. But that is just my intuition. — hypericin

Apparently you can encode information in noise. Binary code looks like digital noise. In your story there is the sense that there is no original message in the noise anyway because it is in truth a practical joke, so there is no deriving a message, only imposing/inventing one.

I'm guessing if the text contains what could be construed as universal patterns, then maybe that could be used as a basis for discovering more complex meanings. The work would have to contain an attempt on the alien's part to assist universal translation. Mathematical regularities would be encoded from the most basic counting system.

*, **, ***, ****, *****

I wonder if intelligent aliens would find this universal, along with demonstrated basic arithmetic operations.

Moving from the universal to local meanings seems like it'd be supremely difficult if not impossible, if alien life is nothing like human life.

why the gold is not growing as fast as bitcoins? — Linkey

No physical asset backs bitcoin which makes trading it easier than gold. Am not sure how crypto backed by gold works really but I'd assume some work needs to be done to secure gold reserves through another company. The limit of that reserve would in theory limit the ability of a company to sell tokens representing it. This might substantially slow the speed at which it can be traded.

The speed at which bitcoin can gain or lose value probably is part of its appeal, allowing folks to try to make substantial return by gambling on its volatility (buy lows, sell highs).

The gold if an example of such pipyruses - it is nearly worthless in regard of its current price. — Linkey

I guess I missed your point, that gold like crypto, and many other assets, are limited in their inherent use value, so they share that in common. I can do more with a sack of onions or a gold coin than lines of code in a crypto wallet. Market supply and demand for assets/currencies makes it all moot however.

If there is a demand for pipyruses and they serve as a store of value, how can they be worthless? The value of other assets and currencies, influences the demand for pipyruses and so it is with cryptocurrencies. So far cryptocurrencies are the 'most volatile assets in modern finance' and as such they don't really resemble stable currencies.

They are still subject to capital gains taxation.

If you have to trade cryptocurrencies for fiat currency to actually buy stuff then inflation does actually affect the price of what you seek to buy in the future.

These programmers loan the money from each other more honestly, than the banks do. — Linkey

What recourse do those that loan cryptocurrencies have to insure that their investment is returned to them? How do you minimize the risk of lending cryptocurrency in its current form? Sounds complicated to say the least.

But if my colleague died yesterday and I am still alive. Today our presents are the same present. Why do I have no knowledge of my colleague today? — Punshhh

You do have knowledge of your colleague, that he is dead. If you have no knowledge of your colleague, how do you know that he is dead and a colleague? If he is dead, he is no longer present.

Religions posit an afterlife of a kind and then skeptics must ask, while if there is that kind of afterlife which provides a bridge of memory to present life, then why is it hidden? The burden is on those who claim to know to find support for opinion/dogma. They can't.

Discontinuity by the erasure of all memory is unpalatable, because folks do not want to thrown again into circumstances of someone else's existence without intelligible cause. We also lose a lot of memory as we live and yet don't feel that we've lost an essential aspect of ourselves by such natural forgetting.

Since we know so little as individuals anyway, maybe we can say the world is mostly hidden. Yet everything we do know, focus on and remember and see takes up the entirety of our being and constitutes what is revealed.

Why is the afterlife hidden? Because it hasn't happened yet. Tomorrow morning is as hidden as the afterlife. It'll be absurd that when we do find ourselves in the afterlife (the present) we will still be looking forward to the afterafterlife. In any present time, if it is some other time's afterlife, our imaginations will be occupied with the future.

So... we have arrived. This is the afterlife. It is now. And there will be coffee again tomorrow, maybe.

Reminds me of the pothole formed by the Air Ambulance plane that crashed on the streets in Philadelphia. If ever a pothole could be symbolic of death, it's that pothole. May the crew RIP.

You can argue for eternal oblivion or eternal consciousness, depending on what has been lost or gained. Without memory there is no way to know what has already occurred, if that occurrence technically does not belong to you.

You can't read the same book twice if it has been erased before the second reading.

You can't step in the same river twice, unless the river suffices as the same river you remember stepping in.

You can't remember stepping in a river you know you've never stepped in.

I guess it means people either love or hate Trump no matter what he does? — TiredThinker

TDS always sounds like it should describe die hard Trumpers, or Trump himself, rather than detractors. If absolute opposition to Trump is irrational, then why is total and slavish endorsement not a form of derangement?

We can diagnose two forms of TDS. The red version of TDS is the one destabilizing the country/economy, as it is causing blue TDS. Just throw it back and tell Trumpers they are also suffering from TDS. TDS springs from patient zero: TRUMP.

Having hope is like drinking salt water. — Bob Ross

These stoic aphorisms are kind of annoying. Drinking salt water is ok, assuming the concentration is low, but maybe we are intended to think of someone who is drinking only sea water as opposed to broth, which is a death sentence. Drinking salt water is ok if you have the means to dilute with fresh water in alternation.

I'll fix it absurdly:

Having some hope, like salt, improves the soup of life.

If hope is salt, you can't live without it.

If one is overcoming, suffering for the sake of transformation, isn't there always hope for the object of achievement. Or are we imagining an absurd hope, like wishing for God to grant us our prayers in the absence of any action to pursue the object of our hope? Even this kind of hope might have unusual power to protect the individual from nihilism (hopelessness). False beliefs (or philosophies) may actually protect people.

What motivates the stoic to overcome if he can't rely on his/her own desire? People do not act from reason alone, as reasoning always has a state of future preference, one preferable by some measure to another.

I think is it preferable to have hope (the feeling that something desired can be achieved or will happen) than to have no hope.

Thanks for unwrapping the aphorism. Sounds like a very tall order all the same, to become immune to worry and the torments of the mind by whatever means. So many people don't have a hope in hell. You must be one of those everyday Joe Buddhas, a non-fancy stoic kind.

"Suffering is a choice."

This is cruel and simplistic. While there is plenty of suffering that might be avoidable if one could muster the courage/will to act rationally, there is plenty of suffering that is not avoidable. Tell that to the soldiers/victims of war, gang violence, rape, addiction, depression, illness and other gnarly incidents of nature.

Maybe this means we can justify harming others more if all suffering is an individual affair.