Reeeeallly bad. — praxis

You take the blue pill—the story ends, and you can put the Matrix behind you. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and get to watch an unlimited amount of crappy prequels, sequels and remakes.

What logical connection do these thoughts have? What kind of connection of any kind do they have other than the fact that I have thought both of them? — T Clark

The Super Bowl season might depend on whether the Earth is still revolving around the Sun. Though we could conceive of a Super Bowl season in which the Sun is revolving around the Earth from our frame of reference.

It'd be weird to say facts in and of themselves have no "logical" connections to any other facts. That they are facts at must entail a vast array of logical connections, right?

If we didn't understand many of the logical consequences/implications from the statement of a fact, would we understand the fact?

If the latter, it comes of parallel consequence that we accept modern humanistic bestiality as "human" with cute, incomprehensibly cute parentheses. — john27

Ain't no one gonna accept beastiality except a vanishing and disturbed minority. Getting off to furry/octopus porn doesn't count as beastiality. A human dressed in a costume is a human.

If beastiality is inherently wrong, what about anthropomorphic animals? — john27

Anthropomorphic features are on an arbitrary continuum. If you put a hat on some slime mold, it's more human eh?

If you dress an animal up to give it anthropomorphic features before you exercise sexual gratification with said animal, it's still bestiality. Veggestiality is far more common. Melons are quite popular.

But given that, if we don't need consent to eat an animal, why would we need consent to eat out an animal? Taboo and probably useless questions from a standpoint of good taste to be sure.

Stylized/cartoony bestiality porn is probably far less stigmatizing with regard to your peers finding out rather than the real act.

The overpopulation of animals is due to the fact that people keep demanding the products of their suffering, and so the people of that industry forcibly reproduce them to satisfy that demand. — Amalac

Disregard all animal production for a moment then and consider wild stocks, like the ocean. Suppose we had access to unlimited sustainable reserves of fish. Does catching fish cause suffering that could otherwise be avoided. Everything dies eventually and some might say that the suffering at the end of life in a state of nature is comparable to the suffering of culling.

Could vegans embrace insects as a food or is there still concern over taking life. I'm not so sure being ethically opposed to eating insects makes much sense from an appeal to suffering.

What's weird is that some vegans don't eat honey but it could be argued that bee keeping improves the life of a bee colonies because bee colonies always often fail in nature for all kinds of reasons. For example, if a colony is queenless and for some can't produce new queens, you just introduce them to the next colony over which might have healthier conditions/resources to continue their work. Bee keepers extend the life of colonies as much as they can in exchange for honey and pollination. Sounds like a win win to me.

Similarly you could make the case that humane farming of animals for food might cause less suffering than animals experience in a state of nature. For example the winter cull is probably kind of brutal for animals that didn't consume sufficient calories during the warmer season. If farmers could manage their farms well enough to assess degrees of suffering and to expertly cull animals that are suffering, this might provide better conditions for animals compared to the state of nature.

Humans are probably the most wretched of animals insofar as we internalize the severity of our own suffering as we project it onto animals. Substantial to human suffering is that we terrorize ourselves over a past and a future. There is so much we have to be aware of compared to animals (ex.climate change, working joyless hours to fill the car with gas, anxious conflicts of moral imperative...).

There are other kinds of pollution besides carbon dioxide gas. The folks who work in region with eco-friendly jobs are often exporting pollution elsewhere. It might suck to be stuck in a place that manufactures public infrastructure supplies for rich "eco-friendly" regions.

The solar industry, like other electronic industries, relies on many well-known toxic chemicals. For solar, these include arsenic, cadmium telluride, gallium arsenide, hexafluoroethane, hydrofluoric acid, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride, putting frontline workers and communities at risk to toxic chemical exposure. — https://www.corebuffalo.org/impact-of-solar-panel-manufacturing

Ayn Rand will become the darling of a new academic philosophy that exists only in privately funded think tanks and mega yacht Seasteading universities.

Immortality by access to immense wealth will be bolstered and sustained by philosophy which glorifies selfishness.

But some rogue faction will be working on introducing new fatal diseases to the immortals because of the unfairness of it all. It'll be a new old arms race war time until collapse with same old philosophical questions.

The thumbnails with qualia are all good, the ones that have those je ne sais quoi properties that blind folk can't see.

I have a lot of trouble even understanding the word. Near as I can tell, it's complete nonsense. — tim wood

Really, I thought it was an incredibly simple idea.

Qualia is what a philosophical zombie doesn't have, any interior experience (likeness?) of existence.

The Dude collapsed in the sand, blistered and broken under the zenith of an arid Sun. There were no groupies left, no White Russians, no pot. He was strangely alone and couldn't lift himself up. The agony of thirst pitched him into an otherworldly haze of illusions.

Soda Fountain girls were bowling beneath the dunes. The pins were pitchers of iced water, bottles of Kaluha and cartons of Half-n-Half.

"Can I get some water, man? Someone... get me outta here."

"This is your exit, honey. These few minutes before the drop is way crazier than Burning Man. Try not to freak out."

Life is not on fire. Life is homeostatic. — praxis

Not a very good metaphor eh? Life converts inputs, requires fuel, like fire to sustain homeostasis. Attachment and aversion mediate the input/outputs which have consequences toward a future. Small actions can have great effects... like a match which ignites a forest. Maybe the properties of fire jive with the concept of karma.

Will have to look to see if Buddha has a Water sermon. "Life, o Bhikkus, is a thirsty bag of water."

Guess this basically covered by What is Nirvana? thread.

_______

The Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta)

The Buddha approached Gaya on his palanquin, followed by 952 adherent beggars (Bhikkus) with their begging bowls in hand.

On top of a hill, after eating a very sweet mango, he gave a sermon to any and all who happened to be a part of his audience

"All things, ladies and gentelmen, are on fire. "

"Whatever sensations received by the senses, the forms and receivers of perception, whether pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent are on fire."

"With what are these things on fire you might ask?"

"With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire."

"And we are against the inflammation of all hindrances which fuel the conflagration of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. "

"My brothers and sisters, we are strangely inflamed and activated to therapeutically cool inflammation, to quench the raging fires of Dukkha."

"You must excuse any contradictions."

"Is my sermon, my friends, on fire? Or does it cool one to unconditioned stillness?"

"When the world cannot burn, dissipated by this stillness, by the absence of passion, there is no fuel for causation and rebirth is ended. Thereafter there is nothing more to do."

The Buddha raised his hands in prayer.

******

A series of aerial fireworks suddenly shot out of the crowd. The Buddha wasn't embarrassed by such action. A few of the monks clapped with excitement. A few sighed with exasperation.

Nirvana is probably a mundane state of equanimity, where the person has skillful control over their reaction to mental/physical content and can easily slip into flow states. Somehow this is accomplished by meditation in part along with balanced/healthy worldly engagement (Buddha tries many things). There is no final state of the unconditioned, unless we're talking about really being blown out (death/dreamless sleep).

Or maybe Nirvana is the Buddha's secret trick by which we can become philosophical zombies. :scream: The enlightened ones are really just robots now.

Are you confusing the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics?

All multiverses belong to the same universe which is undergoing a transition according to the first and second law of thermodynamics. All of the many worlds are winding down while energy is conserved. But I'm no expert.

Not sure there is much significance to saying numbers "really exist" or viruses are "alive". It doesn't change the useful or empirical nature of these things.

Memes might require life, like viruses, but are not alive. If we discovered similar "non-living" molecular replicators of some sort on another planet we'd all be real excited for what that means regarding the potentiality of life. In such a case the preference for assigning the category might flip but it still wouldn't matter much.

Hm. I've met quite a few folk who are very motivated to live and yet are in constant pain. — Banno

Was just trying to give a safe obvious and uninteresting answer, minus the eternal return bit. Pain and pleasure must also mediate the reason folks with chronic pain continue. The instincts must engage pain and pleasure to keep up the momentum of life. We might classify fear as a kind of pain (under the banner of suffering more like). The crisis of terror in suicidal ideation (as a pain, or motivating instinct) might deter us, among other expectations of future pleasure or avoiding harm (a pleasure), to continue living.

Being able to fulfill our needs must give life value. Which of your needs that aren't being fulfilled, Banno? Please share some personal juicy tidbits by which we can be enlightened while at the same time laugh a lot. Hopefully you are working hard to fulfill those needs in spite of the chronic pain. Live, laugh, love. Thanks.

Pain and pleasure give life its value otherwise we would not be motivated to live at all.

Life is not rare from the standpoint of being since there is no other alternative that has content. Anything that presents content to itself must be a kind of life. A infinity of years of time can pass in an awareness void, unconscious universe, and then suddenly, pop!, we're alive but never ourselves again in a strict sense. Death is not an experience! Time passes for the living.

We're in effect quasi immortals with no conserved content/substance but the inevitability of being conscious since we cannot be dead to ourselves.

Life has value because it is inescapable from the long view of a kind of eternal return, like the phase of flowering on the cosmic tree. There will always be a season for the blooms of consciousness. An eternity of nothing never appears to itself. An eternity of something must appear to itself because the only verification that it is something, is an appearance to itself.

but if your family and friends can be harassed into negligence — Enrique

Sounds like an eerie conspiracy.

Govt. is too uncaring and incompetent to employ such a malicious conspiracy for average joes. If you're dangerous and mentally out there you might get locked up and drugged in a local state institution. Such unfortunate folk probably don't have much of a hope or a prayer with or without govt. intrusion, lacking social support.

There is something to the absurd incentive structure of welfare. Folks might avoid getting a job in the event that they become less well off and they become dependent on the system that doesn't easily adapt to target such issues.

Fraud/bureaucracy is also a big problem for a functioning welfare system. There has been some noise about some NYC contractor siphoning money off shelter funds. Florida is famous for medicare/caid fraud cases on the business side.

We're to weave a mythic narrative, a tapestry, that hides or fills the horror vacui, whether embracing agency as the hand that paints itself or as the hand that is painted.

Better yet we've never heard of the abyss and toil with full absorption in fruitful aspects of the gardens of life.

It's probably more immoral on the whole to be interesting/variable, since ever the ratcheting adaptation of the human race is an existential threat not only to ourselves but many other species.

We humans are immoral because we can't tolerate boredom/stasis.

Curiosity might kill the sapient apes but at least they were interesting.

Why a tesseract specifically, rather than some other geometry projected to the 4th dimension?

Why not a hyperpyramid or a hypersphere?

Careful guys, there is a mirror dimensional dream entity called Nil, kind of like Freddy Kreugar or It but far less suburban, more ancient, who is drawn into this reality by complaints.

If you complain to much you'll be dragged into the mirror dimensional realm and trafficked as slaves. It's a lawless non-democratic place on the other side of the mirror, far worse than our boring dystopia.

Turn back now and stop complaining. Gush in gratitude to defend yourself. Life is grand, a given, a river of boundless mirth, that always flows to the calming rhythm of our ridiculous universe.

Halloween isn't a holiday. Holidays are days on which no work is done.

Therefore holidays don't exist. Can you imagine a day on which no work is done? What is life but work...

Seems like a coin toss whether God can defy logic at this point.

God, come down and show yourself, and settle the issue hand to hand. Can you create a rock that you can't lift for eternity? And how long is eternity if nobody is around to verify that length?

I'm sure he is like those Jinn in Arabian nights, who gets any manner of loops holes based on the limits of language. If he can't lift the rock, can he drop it upside down, or turn off gravity, or kick it? What keeps the laws that determine the outcome of the situation from changing once nobody cares anymore, or between blinks?

Despite that richness it somehow felt thin or lacking passion. — praxis

We've gone from Lynch's extravagant Baroque style to Villeneuve's minimalist Brutalism. The characters resemble and are coterminous with the sand, buildings and worms. Maybe they just haven't eaten enough spice yet.

Determinism seems like it has less the connotative religious/mythic baggage than fate. Fate sounds like there some iffy precognition (or self-fulfilling prophecy) involved, as if what is fated must be because so and so thinks... Whereas, determinism, is just a pinball process running in time according to the laws of nature and the outcome is contingent on the turning of many other things. Maybe determinism allows for more of it could've been otherwise.

It's probably healthier to believe in some kind of free will. All I need to do is believe and voila, like Baron von Munchausen hoisting himself up by his pony tail in the swamp, I'll levitate out of my depressing existence. Think positive thoughts and take flight with the metaphysical placebo.

You might like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

What should I do about this? — Shawn

Try to persuade your farmer/owner not to turn you into bacon to buy more time. I'm sure they'll spot an exceptionally bright pig with the help of some other high IQ animal who can spell words.

Thanks Hasui Kawase (1883-1957) for all the landscapes.

a connection between physical illnesses and mental illnesses — TheMadFool

Why not go the brain tumor made me do it route? There were a couple anecdotes from Robert Sapolsky, one about a guy who shot a bunch of people, murdered his wife and was found to be suffering from a brain tumor next to his amygdala; another guy with a brain tumor which was causing hyper sexual behavior which tipped over into pedophilia (or just child porn?). Removing the tumor for the second case caused the bad behavior to cease.

It's a bit different in theme from prejudices others might form about superficial abnormal postures or physical function. We're either dealing with a physical abnormality that causes unfair discrimination or becomes the actual cause of bad behavior.

There was a kid with Tourettes who sat behind me for a moment in highschool. I swear (pun?) the guy was using his condition as an excuse to exaggerate and swear at me but I was probably wrong. I'd say Tourettes is no excuse to whisper terrible things behind my back.

Accusing the disabled of evil is more of a medieval era thing but our hyper discriminative nature based on the appearance and function of things (do I like what I see) is hard to escape. As they say, always judge a book by its cover unless you have the time, energy to read it (who has time or energy or gives a half a fig?)... as what you see often resembles what you get?

Are these Sauron folk evil because they are ugly? Otherwise we might think the war was unnecessary.
Poor Karl. It's likely that Sauron was the only one who would hire him due to his obvious disability, ie. blindness and bad teeth.

I wouldn't say the posture corresponds to an immoral act. Only cartoons/caricatures probably accept bribes that way. It's not very surreptitious at all if you can't control when this behavior is done and onlookers will be able to derive meaning from context quite easily. They'll say... oh, that guy has Erb's palsy and therefore most likely isn't a police officer...

Nice list. :up:

So the whole of our human economy is and has always been subject to this widespread frailty, where the pursuit of self-interest is primary and the moral obligation to convey truth is secondary, expedited by the absurd inefficiencies of bureaucracy.

Goodbye fiestaware. — praxis

Radioactive fiestaware should complement Squashtatues™. Maybe you can induce polyploidy in the seeds with those plates. Get yourself a lead china cabinet.

Is this concept really fundamental to Capitalism's survival? It becomes sort of true that If one person goes down, another goes up. Because I can make more out of what I have if I exploit the environment around me doing things such as lowering wages, benefits, and adopting certain labour-saving technologies, etc. — kudos

Maybe the popular term that covers some of your concern is creative destruction? The price for ever greater efficiency from business competition results industry transformation, unemployment and wealth transfer. The social/economic landscape of capitalism is always mutating at uncomfortable speed, because as David Harvey says, capital cannot abide a limit. The future is the gig economy.

_____

"The effect of continuous innovation ... is to devalue, if not destroy, past investments and labour skills. Creative destruction is embedded within the circulation of capital itself. Innovation exacerbates instability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime force pushing capitalism into periodic paroxysms of crisis. ... The struggle to maintain profitability sends capitalists racing off to explore all kinds of other possibilities. New product lines are opened up, and that means the creation of new wants and needs. Capitalists are forced to redouble their efforts to create new needs in others .... The result is to exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated .... The drive to relocate to more advantageous places (the geographical movement of both capital and labour) periodically revolutionizes the international and territorial division of labour, adding a vital geographical dimension to the insecurity. The resultant transformation in the experience of space and place is matched by revolutions in the time dimension, as capitalists strive to reduce the turnover time of their capital to "the twinkling of an eye".


Harvey, David (1995). The Condition of Postmodernity. pp. 105–06. ISBN 978-0-631-16294-0.

Horticulture (Gardening)

The new economic boom ushering in a new golden age will result from custom 3d printed squash molds. Everyone will store strange shaped squash on their shelves as food statues and it'll become an epidemic of crippling aesthetic addiction, especially around Halloween.

Squash statues, the genesis of a new religion.

Thanks to the hardworking USPS who is probably so tired of delivering an infinity of boxes by now to shitty entitled customers that they've decided to give up. My box full of advanced consumption materials must have been swallowed by a whale by now.

Except for the employee at the local office who was born to take the "service" out of customer service.

Another unanswerable question is how to apply such advice, if such advice could be vetted to be uncommon and wise, while having no will to do so whatsoever.

How does one find the will to do anything that the suffering (or pleasure) of life doesn't already enforce? What motivates an obstinate ass to pull a cart?

A cloud of uncertainty has already struck all senses, a dreaded doubt encoils me. Good luck, I say to myself, "Good Luck".

As a blessed figure myself, I give away free post attention to the needy in exchange for their sins.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in polar heaven.
Give us this day our daily bird meat; and forgive us our trespasses as we sometimes forgive those who trespass against
us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil into luxury.
rAmen.