My point is that I think you exist because in different mental states you caused certain experiences and feelings in me. I think this is more than necessary to prove your existence. — javi2541997

But we don't need and can't use private dream content for the proof of any existence as it stands in contrast with what really confers that proof: the waking life of enduring reality. Though we can equivocate here for the sake charity/fun that dreaming together is constitutive of the possibility of any experience of each other. Paradoxically in this equivocation, dreaming together also requires us to be awake, to share our visions/perspectives as we are doing so here.

Secondarily maybe you are conveying there are certain TPF members who you enjoy exchanges with, time after time, and their appearance in your dream signals a deeper kind of acknowledgement/value of their being/existence.

We could strip Berkeley's dictum "To be is to be perceived" of its metaphysical weight about foundations and consider it as just a dictum about existential/social relevance.

I attach relevance and importance to the fact that I experienced exactly the same thing both dreaming and awake. — javi2541997

It's impossible to experience anything twice with exactitude. With respect to a person's perceptual habits/expectations much of what is potentially new to a re-experience may be rendered negligible by habitual perception. We tune out most of the information available to us for good reason.

The people you perceive are no more constitutive of what is real than the people you imagine as an artifact of past perception. Though we can ponder this to impractical consequence. We ought to know the use value of determining what constitutes the many kinds of things that could be said to exist, whether abstract or concrete.

We do imagine and produce simulacra of humans at the level of disembodied, abstract, internal, private illusions. We do this here in the forum by language alone, to assist the projection of mixtures, amalgamations, explorations of ideas by reading others representations of their thought.

We are dreaming now, to the extent we participate in a communal dream of shared reality. The brain is blind, subject to the projection of its own representations of the world it has indirect access to. Many minds are projecting upon another, merely abstractions, which necessarily tune out and simplify the horrendously complex empirical world.

The map is not the territory.

The perceived person is not to be confused with the whole person.

Yet the contrary position also holds:

The map becomes the territory, insofar as it remakes/refies the territory.

The perceived person stands in for the person, even in their absence, as a memory mediated figure. The expectation holds they resemble themselves predictably. Javi resembles Javi enough to affirm: Javi is Javi.

There is a horrendous video of a Korean(?) mother who lost her child, who was enabled by AI to bring back an interactive simulacra of said child. Something inside me recoils against this, yet if the mother could just dream the same scenario, on command, and it was possible to be made public, would I have the same reaction. Probably not.

Wait when I dream of you. — javi2541997

Dream Michael is an incarnation of Zeus... He is sporting a gilded purple himation right now in a aural sphere on planet Jupiter in the eye of the red storm. Hopefully this suggestion will have amusing effects.

"Even the gods who are not his natural children address him as Father, and all the gods rise in his presence." (Homer) Guess it comes with being a mod.

But you are resistant to silly associative contamination for good reasons. No amount of telling you that Michael is (like) Zeus will make you believe that Michael is (like) Zeus.

But we should try anyway. Michael (what/which Michael?) is like Zeus (what/which Zeus?).

Quis ut Deus?

I have never experienced Zeus, nor did I dream with him. I think it is pretty obvious the cause: his source of existence is missing. — javi2541997

You've used the phrase "dreaming with" several times, whereas "dreaming of" sounds more apt. It's kind of odd because in order to dream with someone you'd have to share in the same content.

Joseph Campbell called myth (shared narrative/ideas about what is) communal dream. So maybe we can stretch this to the concept of dreams/reality as the domain of social constructions, reality as shared/directed hallucination.

The frustration of a lucid dream is apparent in and round those rare moments when you take what is occurring in a dream to be reality. The only notable example of this was thinking I had a drawer full of cash, which evaporated on waking. :groan:

The "guided" version of any evolutionary process is always susceptible to returning to the "unguided" version in time due to unforeseen accidents/contingencies. The great spans of time, as BC said, make these accidents/contingencies more likely to happen (inevitable).

There was a fun simulation game called Surviving Mars that came out in 2018. It's a resource management game which is a race against time to build and maintain a colony on Mars (kind of like Starcraft, SimCity) Technology is constantly breaking down and requires maintenance. All your scout/extraction vehicles are running out of fuel. There are trade-offs to each energy production type (like having to clean dust off solar panels). You have to reach a kind of technological threshold for resource abundance before you run out of everything you need to maintain the colony but so much chance is involved that any minor problem can snowball to catastrophe.

Eventually if you get rich enough you can get fusion generators and a space elevator and this turns the game into a cakewalk, as it frees your from the limitations of extracting what you need from the surface of Mars. But just input enough time and realistically, with the complexity of a real Mars, you're likely to fail. Any boostrapping remote/self-automated technology is going to appear like a form of life in itself.

Consider the scenario of facing a Chicxulub level impact (%70 of life wiped out) event today. Could we manage to prevent that? Just move backwards 100 years from now and the answer to that question is an obvious no. The Wright bros are just flying their glider then bam!, Chicxulub II ( the return of the great death).

Managing our own evolution, as conserving our level complexity as an ecologically embedded species, requires us to have all sorts of redundancies in place. Ideally, we need another comfy planet, or new bodies/adaptations to sustain this project in inhospitable environs.

Just turn on HBO or Netflix and live your life. You'll love it. I promise. — Outlander

This forum is just another version of HBO/Reddit/Youtube. You'll love it. I promise.

I don't see why it would be immoral unless one had views similar to antinatilism. — RogueAI

Let's give you the seat of that monotheistic god, architect of the universe, at his control panel. To seed the universe with extra life, trillions upon trillions of new organisms, some will evolve the ability to feel pain. Add to this the great resource competition of organisms eating other organisms, every momentary pleasure/satisfaction comes at another's pain and annihilation. Further still some worlds gain intelligent species, socially complex agents, and the capacity of suffering grows in proportion to their complex needs.

Is a universe that filled/seeded with life, vastly more events of suffering, any more or less preferable than a universe that is by comparison empty? Would it matter what the internal state of god/alien was (motivated by purely selfish pleasure/amusement) in guiding its decision to have more life in the universe?

Are these questions ridiculous?

Are we talking about imposing life on a barren planet or "overriding" the life that would have evolved on a life-bearing planet with life of our choosing? — RogueAI

For the purpose of the hypothetical, let's say no direct overriding. We seed only lifeless planets that could maintain life, with the kind of early life it would naturally develop if it could. Problem here is the degree to which initiating this kind life could be successful in time. Many seeding attempts would realistically fail as a matter of chance, through many levels of the Great Filter idea. So there is no telling how effective pressing the button really would be anyway in terms of stages of evolution. Even if we got global levels of bacteria, is evolving complexity inevitable if it doesn't go extinct for 5 billion years?

Or you can run with any version of guided panspermia. Ought we send civilizational seeds to other worlds that grow version of ourselves as we are at the time? Is this any worse than jump-starting in situ natural selection on a planet by magic. I guess the technological process of the seeding technology could be its own form of life (autonomous robots growing humans).

Think my sci fi hypothetical collapsed... The only reason we don't want to contaminate other planets in our solar system is because we want to find evidence for how common independent events of abiogenesis might be in the universe.

Although I prefer to believe that god has always been and is vastly different to created life forms. — kindred

We can have all/any of the gods though in any way we want them but they remain disembodied abstractions.

I'm partial to the idea of achieving some kind of mystical union with the universe, however ridiculous that sounds. I need a placebo. Maybe it is just the hope for existential peace, achieving greater ease in the world. I think the true function of kinds of religious life (discipline) helps us to get to a better way of being in the world.

Will the civilizational seed contain one's choice of religion?

naturalistic and supernatural explanation would be equally valid — kindred

Supernatural explanations are plural (every culture has its own gods and mythologies). The gods/Gods resemble projected variations of ourselves or other creatures, metaphorical amalgamations pulled from nature, beings with supreme agency yet still limited in power over what happens in the natural world. They don't appear to us except as extensions/combinations of entities entirely natural.

We often can't help our anthropomorphisms and our metaphorcial flights of fancy. They are helpful because they comfort and amuse us.

Let's say you are the alien/god who can seed life but you don't get to guide the process in such a way to produce something specific relative to you, like pugs, purple carrots, cloth wearing apes who can talk to each other and build an internet.

There is a big red button that every time you press it seeds life on some viable planet in the universe, even if the chemical substrate is vastly different. What reasons might you give for why you ought to or ought not to press the button? Let's say the way in which life is seeded on these planets is in the way life would've naturally started there in the first place, so you aren't imposing an overarching goal much, except for the process of natural selection.

Compare this kind of non-guided seeding of life to a scenario of guided seeding, such that the panspermia seed reproduces our particular kind of life elsewhere (humans with a carefully chosen set of symbiotic organisms, like purple carrots, potatoes and dogs). Is the imposition of this kind of specific life in new areas of the universe any more morally questionable than the impositions of any kind of life anywhere?

If there is plenty of space and resources out there, seemingly empty, and our type life cannot escape the inevitable transformation at the hands of an evolutionary process, whether it incorporates goals or no goals, does it matter whether we seed life or not?

Don't answer if you don't care to.

guided evolution also be taken seriously — RogueAI

Should theistic evolution be taken seriously because life could move from planet to planet within a solar system by accident?

Just because life could be seeded doesn't explain abiogensis, or whether it requires or does not require a supernatural explanation.

Hate speech is deviously meant to activate your amygdala, the threat detection system in your brain, in appreciation of the "if it bleeds it leads" theory of attention. Rhetorical fear, virtue and vice signaling, plays a moral role in maintaining social identity/behavior.

Fear, the ability to channel/leverage/exploit fear, is one of the greatest organizing principles/forces in the universe. Everyone is always using rhetorical fear against others and themselves to get things done.

The kissing bug and the lyme carrying tick are parasitic vectors of chronic disease. They want to take your vital god given property and destroy it by their nature. They are waiting for you outside, hidden like tiny little soldiers of war in the bush. Disgusting species do not belong in the USA. They should go back to their countries of origin. They must be avoided and destroyed at all costs.

This is my hate speech against kissing bugs and ticks and pests in general. Luckily they can't register my speech as hateful. I could love them if they didn't threaten to eat and cheat me.

We must wage war on kissing bugs and ticks. And fire ants! They'll conquer the world if we don't fight back...

When you fall asleep tonight, dream of the pests sucking away your vitality. How terrible am I to plant the seeds of these bad dreams, to cultivate an unnecessary fear about your possibly impending decline and death.

An idea is an irreducible mental event that is meaningful and is distinguishable from other ideas. — MoK

That ideas are irreducible mental events sounds somewhat mysterious. Phenomenally, there is no more or less to an idea than what it is to the thinker at the time it occurs...

A car ran over the neighbor's dog.

Does the summary meaning of this sentence comprise an irreducible mental event? It (the idea via sentence) happened, it isn't any more or less than what it means.

Compare:

A 2024 Rapid Red Mustang Mach E ran over our neighbor's 15 year old Chiweenie.

Does the summary meaning of this sentence comprise an irreducible mental event? It (the idea via sentence) happened, it isn't any more or less than what it means. For the sake of telling someone what happened, I could reduce detail. But that telling causes an irreducible mental event to occur in whoever understands the idea(s) of the new sentence.

The appearance of things as they appear to us, are just irreducible mental events. Is this tautology?; ideas are no more or no less than what they are.

How are they properties of the universe? If all beings die. Where are the properties? — Jack2848

It is possibly wrong to say that thoughts are properties about the world they represent, but they provide the means of knowing what is out there. In the absence of all knowers/experiencers, the world continues. But we could be nested in some kind of greater dimension that is inaccessible to the one we are enclosed within (like the Matrix or Mind). The properties outside of this enclosure could be of an entirely different order/nature/being.

Even the physical world is always changing its properties, though often predictably. The macroscopic object holds its mundane relative stasis while the negligible microscopic is quite dynamic. Nothing really is eternal, possibly not even atoms, given enough time.

Without minds, where are the properties of the universe to be found/known?

What are the non-mental properties of this sentence?

Ideas are just intelligible parts/properties of the universe as represented in the mind (as everything is).

What is the nature purpose of having intelligible parts/properties of the universe represented in the mind?

To help you enjoy life in a safe/responsible manner. (Haha! Good luck)

What is the nature of a swiss army knife, a billiards table, or encyclopedia? :monkey:

I'd prefer to not have existed. — flannel jesus

There is always time to change your mind. I am working on it. :wink:

What Difference Would it Make if You Had Not Existed? — Jack Cummins

Not much of a difference in the grand scheme. We were thrown into existence by a kind non-voluntary lottery and if this is true, we could've been anyone. This should give us pause for moral (re)consideration about our behavior to other people (see the golden rule). I've made some terrible decisions in my life that have left an indelible mark on myself and others for selfish reasons. Yet I find hard to hold myself responsible for those decisions because I didn't have the sense and emotional stability to choose the better path at the time. I was a lonely, afraid and stupid kid, pursuing a strong desire to belong and got into self-destructive behavior along with a lot of other stupid directionless kids. And boy did many of us get burned! Think of a moth headed for a flame, or a hungry dog eating poisoned kibble.

But these same kind of dynamics (bad/unconscious choices) are happening everywhere all the time to other people. If we run through the lottery again in a game of eternal recurrence, what are the chances it'll be any better the next time around? Hopefully a large part of the population of humans can say that they prefer to live, that joy outweighs the negative, and that they would say yes to another round of being thrown into the world, even if it means we're going to experience some abject form of hell, like Holocaust, war, genocide, addiction, mental illness, et cetera.

The lottery is going to happen again and yet we can assume it only ever happens once. Buckle up... for the long sleep that must end.

. 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?