So Lambda is responsible for this mess.

Mostly women attend the meditation and prayer service at the building I upkeep.

There were a lot more women than men in the Holy Hell cult, if I recall.

Isn't football a religious/spiritual activity though?

Humans and their dumb intellectual classifications.

Suicide is a the ultimate pain reliever, better than heroin. And the good thing is that it doesn't even matter that you wont experience pleasure again - because this is a kind of suffering, and you are dead. The dead can't be deprived. — dukkha

This almost reads as a rationalization for murder.

The impulse to suicide stems from real suffering. It is a stop gap measure which could just as well accompany an existential resentment strong enough take the lives of other people.

Redeeming the world is different from personal redemption. I find that the latter is always prioritized and seen as a kind of prerequisite for the former. — Thorongil

I would say this could be emphasized more as a grounding context for understanding this topic, that ultimately the act of redeeming the world takes place form a first person point of view and is about the awareness of suffering in the world (one's own suffering) and what one needs to do in order to overcome it or come to terms with it psychologically.

The Crucifixon has been said to represent "a voluntary participation in the sorrows of the world" (Joseph Campbell). Instead of escaping the world, redemption is about the individual voluntary meeting his fears in an exercise of existential overcoming, true learning, that he may ascend to new being.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

Alice (drunk off her ass)

Eugenics isn't about what "you" want, it's about what the authorities have decreed. — Bitter Crank

I think we can use the term to apply to designer babies in a Capitalist setting, even though as you say it is speculative sci-fi at the moment. The term is possibly too shadowed by its history and should maybe be abandoned to your definition.

You've seen the film, GATTACA, I'm sure, where citizens are discriminated against on the basis of whether they've undergone pre-birth genetic enhancement.

I should add that I want the child I deserve, I don't want to pick. — Agustino

But you would want to avoid severe genetic defects that might upend your family's future well being, right? So you don't really mean what you just said.

Is this a recommendation to "be here now"?

It isn't easy for those to reign in their irrational fears by which their perceptions are organized. A lot of the time the projected future, present and or past is unhelpfully false, or at least distorted in some sometimes useful sometimes harmful way. My fears about the future have me in an existential anxiety trap. Reworking the habits of perception is not easy by any means.

Stories of past, present, future bring order to chaos, unless they do the opposite, which they often do.

And I second what Unenlightened said, the eloquent bastard.

Whatever it is that makes a breeding pair attractive to each other probably has nothing to do with non-obvious but serious genetic flaws.

And eugenics is a social plan, not personal preferences. — Bitter Crank

We're not just talking about non-obvious genetic flaws with regard to eugenics, we're talking about the possibilities of shaping human features in a cosmetic or performative way out of personal preference. Though I know natural selection isn't a eugenics program of any sort, the same forces, cultural or instinctual, that help us pick our mates also help us to determine what we want our children to look and act like.

Why are so many South Koreans getting plastic surgery (and why do they have to attach a picture to their job resume)? I'm sure they would leap to any eugenics program that would make it easier on their children in such competitive atmosphere.

New Yorker: About Face

We already practice eugenics with regard to sexual preference and mate selection. The reason we desire some traits in our sexual partner has something to do with the likelihood that the traits in our offspring will be beneficial to them at some level, even if what we have selected for is average and quite common.

The body is either all apples, all oranges or mixed fruit basket.

It's full of impolite disinterest and poop.

Was a self-employed landscape maintenance guy who luckily fell into a job with a salary, rent and utilities covered by employer. My income is the effect of a private investment company and its privately funded non-profit foundation, so I'm basically working for a wealthy person.

I find work routine and dull but it does help me to keep physically and mentally together. I don't have much discipline or energy to use my off hours for personal growth and usually find myself consuming mindless entertainment. I struggle with insomnia which sours my mood a lot.

If I was wealthy enough I'd work on building an off grid tiny house community centered around a communal farm and a workshop for promoting open source DIY activities. Fuck the Capitalist pigs who don't know how to utilize land properly.

So now that you've given up your legal rights as a human being we are sending you to Foxconn, were you will work building Iphones until you collapse. You are already obsolete as a worker there and completely expendable. After you are dead your fat will be rendered down and sold to street food vendors and your desiccated ground remains will be sold off as fertilizer.

You have simply become the means to someone else's end (something the rest of us human beings have been historically trying to escape).

I was being facetious. I guess MU's argument is more subtle than that but I still don't really grasp it.

Everything is determined by the past. Life can't happen any other way than it does. There is no free will. Chance is a myth.

Case closed.

>:)

My only complaint is that you've not credited the source of your quote.

It really does feel good to scold you softly here.

The suspicion is that the TPF elites all already know the source and that the omission is to further exclude us lesser educated laypersons.

Viva la revolución

Moderator's Note
The source has since been added by myself, Sapientia.

I suspect that random mutation does not account for the speed of phenotypic changes in the given examples of selective breeding of plants and animals over just a few generations.

The traits already have been selected for (or are apparent) in a breeding pair of animals and are a part of the genetic diversity of the species. A very well practiced horse or dog breeder might have an idea what traits are possible or likely given pedigrees over a few generations.

The variation made possible from genetic diversity of a species (shuffling the gene pool by a lottery of chances) is vastly different from the variation made possible by random mutation. Maybe this highlights a problem with the given example of animal husbandry.

Why would you say that changes to an organism's environment are chance events? — MU

Even determined (or selected) events (ie. you deciding to brush your teeth this morning) are chance events in the sense that they are contingent (subject to chance) upon unknowns.

If your tooth brush falls in the toilet by accident and you don't have a back up, what is the "chance" (probability) you'll brush your teeth?

What is the chance (probability) I will die from a coconut falling on my head today?

We don't yet have Laplacian-Demon computers to tell us the grand unalterable choreographed nature of life.

It might be helpful to discuss what is meant by chance or randomness with regard to evolution, unless it is blatantly obvious of course.

I believe that the art of husbandry demonstrates to us that physical variations are most likely not the effect of chance. Domesticated plants and animals evolve in ways which are desirable to us, not in ways dictated by chance. If we had to wait for random mutations to produce the desirable changes which have resulted in the many varied domestic species, we would still be waiting. — Meta Under

You're discounting the vast numbers of individuals that are discarded in the process of selecting for an individual with desirable traits, over many generations. Gene modification by mindful selection does take a while as one is growing out plants and or animals which would not otherwise be selected for because of any number of possible chance variables.

In some sense you can pile on the unlikelihood of human husbandry in the universe as a chance event in selecting the Washington Navel clone.

I'm just offering up an unexplored, free floating, hazy intuition.

A state of total knowing seems contradictory, since there is too much information, too much mutually exclusive conditions that could exist at any time. It seems as useful as its opposite state, a condition of total ignorance.

Ignorance informs or contextualizes knowing (or what can be known) in some way.

For instance if I know how the events of my life will unfold perfectly in the future how would that change me in the present (would I be a fatalist or determinist of some sort)? There could still be the option of ignorance as a value, ie. those who do not wish to know something choose not to know it.

Zen conjures a setting of Japanese austerity, essentially a kind of brutal boot camp for the initiate.

Drill instructors always are characterized as assholes but that is part of the tradition.

Maybe the superior is getting a taste of his own medicine in a humorous way (if Zen makes everything easy, everything is already resolved).

What is an example of a useful metaphysical fiction?

Borges poetic illustration of this thought experiment is endlessly fascinating and enigmatic.

The library has all possible configurations of letters which code information but it's all relative to ciphers or interpretive agents.

When presented with a book or cipher you would always say that it is finite relative to your function or its function but that goes without saying. Actual infinity is just as incomprehensible as super humongous giant universal size sets of whatever.

There is too much to count some in some finite set but there is always more to count in another finite set, and there is always more to count in another finite set, et cetera.. ad finitum.

Who is counting? Who is measuring? Surely these agents are infinite? .....

:s

Boltzmann brains are analogous to the intelligible books in Borges finite library.

Why do we talk about brains when simpler objects would be just as numerous and far more probable, that which brains might require to come into being the way they have? A Boltzmann brain is a place holder for any an all possible objects and their corresponding probabilities in the timeless entropy soup, including the total serendipitous arrangement of the universe itself.

Given that the universe is always far weirder than one can possibly imagine, there is bound to be unforeseen or new interactions near the end state which will happen when nothing is there to see it.

I like the idea of spontaneous reset.

...how can a infinite consciousness experience infinity from a relative point, if it experiences all the points? — Asktheshadow

Depending upon which unit we use to measure the coastline of England, the kilometer, meter, the centimeter, the femtometer with respect for accuracy and precision, the end values change. At some point it is impractical and useless to choose a unit that isn't useful. No one could ever measure the coastline by planck length, but it it were possible the length coastline of England would contradict its practical length.

I struggle to make this coherent but maybe when dealing with infinity, things need not be coherent (maybe infinity's semantic neighborhood includes words like contradiction, incoherence, impossibility, unlimitedness, endlessness, et cetera).

I borrow this idea from Borges story. Most of the information library is incoherent relative to the finity (limit, end, terminus) that is the reader. In the absence of a reader, or being, there is nothing (infinity or noumenon). Even if we are to concede that the universe exists without observers, so what, it is only meaningful relative to the what imposes or receives meaning upon it.

This recalls the grand drama of GOT with its horrendous acts like the Red Wedding and the Sept of Balor.

House of Cards is also another, where a brutal Machiavellian agent is lauded in someway as an an immoral antihero. By virtue of being free of moral constraints, accepting whatever the consequence may be, such elite figures move forward, conquer and reshape the world via cunning acts of murder.

"History is a bath of blood." William James

Some of us harbor re-sentiment against the performative power of knowing as it is expressed via elite figures here. It's comparable to the performative power of being rich, or having functioning kidneys.

If that resentment is akin to a flame and it happens to exist next to a powder keg, then an explosion may occur.

Events of mass killings as reported through the news remind us of our own resentment, however irrational, absurd or unfounded that resentment might be.

Sounds like you've read J.L. Borges the Library in Babel

His library is finite but the number of books (all possible combinations of letters) would exceed the number of estimated atoms in our universe by a tremendous magnitude. You could travel among recognizable copies of Moby Dick for your lifetime.

One of the imaginary librarians speculates that all is needed to reproduce this finite library is a single volume, since all books are limited to 26 letters and whatever the repeating format is.

I wonder what silly number the permuted arrangement of periodic elements would give us, given the amount of atoms there are in the universe.

Infinity has no meaning if we are finite creatures. Infinity also has no meaning if we are infinite creatures, because it's all relative to the scope of what we experience, whether we agree upon finity or infinity as a qualitative description.

In an infinite world maybe contradictions are permitted. The meaningless is meaningful. Infinity is finity, et cetera.

Wosret is suffering from time bias.

I wish I could live for the future (investing more for retirement) or in a better future (where I own a self-flying personal transport).

Insofar as I'm only eating meat 2 days out of the week, comprising at most 3 meals, I'm living for a future of diminishing green house gas emissions.

I'm trending toward veganism. If I ever reach such a transcendental state my being well glow with an aura of purity and self-righteous power. All meat eaters will cower in annoyance by my eternal presence as pronouncement: Soylent Red is animals!!! My astral body will be able to project itself into the future and I will be: A Vegan in the Future.

"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Two pence a week, and jam every other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire me – and I don't care for jam."
"It's very good jam," said the Queen.
"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day'," Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!" — Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking Glass

What I meant to say is that I'm a Vegan in some Pasts, Vegan in some Futures but never Vegan Today. If only Today were Tomorrow, the Future would be Now and so... (I'm done).

Mr. Mayor was at the front of a hopeful coup that would undermine the the monetary investment in the PF.

I wonder what kind of historical parallels this might dredge up.

The act of a single person destroys the value of a business by some non-illegal means.

This is same as the copycat suicide effect.

The question is how do we limit such news events without interfering with freedom of the press.

I don't think a belief in hell deters criminal acts in the absence of a valued peer group that promotes such a belief. Anyone who is pushing hellfire and damnation is not a part of my peer group. Not being recognized or valued, as part of a social unit, is also part of the problem.

The United States suicide belt is explained as comprising mostly 'lonely white men with access to guns'.

I think the errors (variants) of thought ( via cultural evolution) can be some way compared with the errors (variants) required for natural selection.

One might think of an error on the part of natural selection as a genetic variant that cannot pass on its genes.

Compare it with an error of thought (an irrational belief) that is selected for by a group. Just because the belief might be false doesn't mean it doesn't have a useful effect with regard to some larger perspective.

There are nigh countless reasons why a thought, idea or belief might be selected for.

They bought the PF for $ 20k!!!

I doubt they've recouped their investment since the transaction and the slow upkeep doesn't bode well for site activity in the future. Is there some ulterior business model at work that doesn't involve ad revenue?

Usually a complex system in biology does not survive or even evolve unless there is a way this benefits the organism. — darthbarracuda

You're including any type of evolution (change) that doesn't harm the organism in this statement, which is to say that some heritable changes are neutral with regard to replication but not to other future states of being.

The "benefit of the organism" is dubious phrase here because we're left wondering who or what benefits like a self-aware human does, that a creature is able to register in some way the benefits of natural selection, (we have to frame the question, who or what benefits).

What if for instance there is a situation in which our behavior is determined by a vastly greater mind, ie. an Artificial Intelligence, always to "our" benefit?

Or take the domesticated cow for a different example.

Cows replicate with the help of humans, we use their milk meat and in exchange provide them food, shelter, healthcare and protection from the elements for a while. However, many would hesitate to proclaim that this particular model of mutalism (if that) benefits the cow. Further we may even argue whether a surplus of beef benefits us humans due to our tendency to overeat, or green house waste or other issues.