Pretend you are being charged by the word. — Bitter Crank

I ought to vow ABSOLUTE SILENCE on that account. (9 pennies).

And if time is also money... (5 pennies + y seconds)

(Parenthetically closed words ought to be charged at a different rate)

1. A reply which doesn't make proper use of the quote function.
2. A reply which is too lengthy.
3. A reply which doesn't make proper use of the quote function and is too lengthy. — S

4. If you can't follow these S rules and thus by habit become associated with what is S "bad", you can still post in the Lounge.

Just make sure you poke S with a stick now and then.

This probably belongs in the Lounge, since no work has been done to answer your own question besides what one might extrapolate from the video you presented (someone else's work).

How would we view ourselves as human beings? — Christoffer

My opinion is that desired properties of cream as presented (fixing anything that easily) would have destroyed human life long before a business cabal would've put a quash on it. That destruction might have taken the form of everyone evaporating into light (which could as well be a metaphor for death: a radical change from state A as a known state to state Z an unknown state).

There is a lot in that video that is hard to parse (to go from metaphor to whatever the manifold formal arguments and well worn questions might entail). Pick an aspect, write an essay, then argue points. You have to do it in the standardized way or else no one is interested.

The real cream is probably a symbol for the totality of life (the slime that weaves the whole dynamic web). Death is what dissembles that may provide avenues for new adaptations. The death of an individual is a little death but he, she, it lives on by others who are all supported by the total system. Any severe disturbance like cream might upset the balance in such a way as to eliminate humans in one fell swoop (that is just saying what the film presents to us). Cream would seep on though, facilitating whatever wills itself to continue, if there is such thing as will ( maybe a property of continuity that the cream responds to) inherent to any non-human creature.

Edit: Cream could likely be a metaphor for any technological application that radically alters the total system and the necessary politics required to conserve or progress a desirable type of life (family, community, nation, world) using some kind of cost and benefit analysis.

"If you are going to allow technologies into the market place that destroy people's jobs, it is your responsibility to find a way of replacing those jobs, or compensating those people." This is a line from Brian Cox on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about the social and economic costs of replacing middle class jobs with AI technologies. Worth thinking about.

Oh boy, is that a mistake! Reality is subject to entropy - which means the easy road leads ever downward unto stagnation and death. Everything good is uphill, and going uphill requires effort. We need to expend energy just to stand still - or we fall apart. It's an absolute physical law. — karl stone

Ain't nothing wrong with falling apart but I want to believe the principle that it is absolutely good to endure as along as possible. The energy used to go uphill causes other things to do downhill.

The unusual perturbation of global weather due to burning stored energy to go up hill will cause some things elsewhere (life) to fall apart (go down hill). China absorbs the pollution of global consumption. The horizon of a local arboretum is contaminated with windmills. Once thriving fertile grounds turn to desert. Mosquitos carrying malaria (the biggest killer of all time) expand their territories. Then we try to adapt, still at cost of future adaptation.

My parents both worked full time jobs. My father was next to non-existent (like his father before him). My brother was a mean bastard who believes himself to be a victim (possibly rightly of being unloved and emotionally abused). He was the most successful of the progeny, who severed relations to his family.

In 6 grade I put on a puppet play about suicide. The hero (Superbunny) tried to save someone who jumped off Niagra falls but was moments too late. My teacher was disgusted, I then became target for a few occasions of class humilation ("this is an example of what not to do"). My friend, who played the hero puppet, was an ostracized kid whose family situation terrified me. He was being supported by his Stepmother (father missing) one got the impression that she'd love to be rid of him. If I was in his place I didn't think I'd be able to cope.

I feel myself to be alone in the universe, sometime amidst people I love. But maybe by a measure of action (of doing) it can be said that I don't love anyone. I can't call my indifference a type of love.

I believe in the power of Metta (love and compassion practice). We could have been anyone. We could have been the placid cow, chewing cud, enraptured in bliss, or the cow seized with existential fear before the gate of an abattoir. Or we could have been stuck in a cattle car headed to a concentration camp, separated from mother and father. Mother might have had to choose whom to leave behind.

We should try to treat people well. Vile nihlistic children, puerile hellions seeking the flame annhiliation, and ornery wearied masters seeking five star accommodations. All will be invited to be. They have been.

Doesn't Buddha kind of represent the ultimate stoic.

Thought or feeling for him would not be a problem given an austere regime for training for equanimity in chaos.

Stoicism would likely involve training oneself not just by Wallowing (the limiting cycles of your activity and responsibilities), but by enduring what isn't necessary to endure. Taleb's concept of antifragility might be useful here. Someone who voluntarily endures what they normally avoid is better equipped to handle the unsuspected unpleasant. Common sense?

Is the Taj Mahal a locker?

A place to store memory of your loved ones.

Given your name, TheMadFool, you might be projecting a secret wish, unless you know something that is twisting your noodle into an odd shape. Soon to be TheSaneGenius, I hope.

Most geniuses probably weren't mad. It was the inability of the folks around them to understand them that likely drives psychological illness. What you think others think of you can cause great stress. If everyone withdraws and you lose your social status and income, are threatened with the rack and thumb screws, then yeah, insanity might be quite natural.

A lot of contemporary illness is induced by existential distress (paralyzing fear) and the inability to moderate one's lifestyle (food, physical activity, social needs). Most time is spent working for shit income in the dumb rat race, with little left over to cultivate the self. Society doesn't give a lick about the mad or the so-called unspecialized "normal" apes.

This expression "dangerous knowledge" is like a flag on the peak of a mountain. The unclaimed mountain could be a metaphor for an entire world from a point of view (transpose the flag to the surface of the Moon or Mars).

It might be comparable to "dangerous experience." Why would anyone want to physically go to Mars? They might actually believe they are living in a simulation (remarkable!). From risk-averse life-affirming position, it seems irrational. For a lot of folks life is so absurd as to render the rational as a kind of valuation about what folks believe is rational. When someone says, 'such and such is irrational' is probably a valuation (judgment) never a truth. If rational is x, then...

We presume "philosophy" is worthwhile because of conserved memes (inherited or copied beliefs). Someone once said "an unexamined life is not worth living". This has somehow been conserved in relation to the projected value of the works associated with the man who said "an examined life is not worth living". Many many many men and women ask themselves daily, "is this life worth living." For some it is just a terrible feeling, pain, for what they see is necessary to avoid death. If only they had some "dangerous knowledge" that might undo what they believe is necessary.

If you take a random sample of 100 people and lock them up in solitary confinement for 1 year, what % of those people will have taken their own lives (by what curious speciic means)? What % of those people will have had revelation about the value of some better orientation life? What % will be unchanged, neither positively or negatively affected? If this was law in some society, what behavioral effect might it have in that society?

"Dangerous knowledge!" Whoa! What a meme this is.

Put a box in your child's room that says "Dangerous, do not open!" and see what happens. Put a tree in the garden of Fleabin with a sign that says "This tree is poisonous, do not eat its fruits." You never know until you try, unless you already know because someone has tried.

Christianity ideally ties one to vegetarianism, with eggs and milk coming from humanely raised animals who aren't slaughtered after giving up their usefulness. — NKBJ

(Not addressed to NKBJ but to All)

From a practical standpoint, finding milk from animals that aren't going to be slaughtered is not easy. My boss warns against red meat as "bad news" (Vedanta related ethics) but he sure loves his market bought cows milk and butter, which nonetheless is a byproduct of a grim process of separating babies from their mothers, both of which go to slaughter.

Lots of folks of older cultures gave ritualistic thanks to the meaningful sacrifice of animals, especially because that sacrifice was a necessary condition of survival. The Ainu of Japan used to raise bears as pets for a while, treated them as a member of the family, then slaughtered them with great piety (or so I read).

Meat consumption has a ripple of measurable effects on the global ecosystem but so do vegetables (see corn, cotten, soy and oil palm). Growing food at scale is an existentially nasty, ethically questionable, but necessary business. Collateral damage includes poisoning folks with chemicals and animal feces (see hog farming in Southern regions of U.S.) One might want to frame the ethics of an action with regard to a balance of the total system we live in. Any conclusion or consensus is unlikely going to change the universal biological appeal of meat however.

Ribs are good with a nice rib rub. Slow cooked in a mesquite smoker, for fall off the bone goodness.

Ribs are bad in mass, as they cause rivers of toxic effluent which never seems to be in your backyard or in your river. Those ribs haven't cause your son or daughter to be born with asthma. That has nothing to do with you. Or does it?

Life is said to increase the rate of entropy to maintain its complex order but relative to the way a single star disperses energy all human caused destructive events are negligible by such a comparison. If life actually increases the rate of entropy globally then why wouldn't a collision that destroys all life reduce the rate of entropy globally. I think we have to talk about the enthalpy and entropy of systems relative to one another.

I don't understand entropy but I'd like to. The higher the rate at which a system disperses energy the higher entropy it has I think. Apokrisis is the one to ask on this.

Unless mankind could initiate vacuum decay, nothing we could do would change the natural trend of the universe (beyond the boundaries of earth) in a meaningful way. Unless flying little data-collecting drones out into the great beyond is worthwhile.

No, We do not punish the innocent, there is no paradox. — DingoJones

Likewise Nature, just like Justice, is blind.

No one is innocent and no one is guilty but shit happens. Elephants and Orcas are born into the circus. Bulls go to slaughter. Both (the innocent and the guilty) can suffer the absurd outcomes of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to existential requirements of arbitrating apes.

If we had a cosmic entropy meter its needle would show a sudden advance every time such cataclysmic events happen. — Jacob-B

There is the linear ‘wear and tear’ of the universe; the dispersion of matter and dilution of energy, and there is non-linear catalytic jumps caused by supernovas, a collision of galaxies, and black holes. If we had a cosmic entropy meter its needle would show a sudden advance every time such cataclysmic events happen. — Jacob-B

Vaccum decay is strange. Could humans initiate vacuum decay in theory ( as a malentropic event)?

In Hawking’s book, once the Higgs Field becomes metastable, the vacuum decay bubble will emerge. Being at a high energy state, it will quickly move to consume everything at a low energy state, or everything else around it. The vacuum bubble moves along destroying atoms, turning everything it encounters into hydrogen. — Phillip Perry,

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/physicists-accidently-discover-a-self-destruct-button-for-the-entire-universe

This sounds like a reset to a lower entropic state (earlier type configuration of the universe), though how the hydrogen is spread in time and space, along with current rates of universal expansion, would probably make up a universe that is not comparable to a younger version of our universe on the largest scale.

It's not your fault you're lost but neither should that be cause to harm others from an inner spring of resentment. Do no harm, though that may seem impossible under stipulated conditions. Death can happen at any time.

Everyone is lost, except those who have decided they are not and submit themselves to what the believe is necessary in light of their attachments (Life).

Imagine someone less fortunate than you, tortured by fate, and love them. Even a gesture of artificial love (empty of authentic feeling) is better than nothing at all. Feel good that you know what it means to love your friends and family.

And it's like a learning-disabled level confusion--maybe because we're playing a game where we're trying to create problems to solve because we're bored? (and we unfortunately do not want to tackle more challenging but practical problems like making sure that everyone has housing, health care, etc.)--to be confused whether we're talking about what we're imagining existing as something other than something we're imagining. — Terrapin Station

We should all just keep reposting this post. This would've been a great modbot response in the old PF.

:rofl:

Nietzsche, Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," when the word "poor" would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. — Nietzsche, Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

To us, the difference between a person and a chocolate cake is obvious. We have a clear understanding of what is the one or the other. — Mind Dough

It's obvious in a particular and common context of interactions but if you were to set up a finer grain measure of comparison, for some possible reason, there might be a less clear understanding of the difference between what is human and chocolate cake. The cake disappears in digestion to become something else (as its divisible constituents undergoing biochemical transfomration). The difference is clear because its useful to know that clear difference.

Just like a question of when does life begin, for a moral consideration about a woman's choice to abort, when does cake end (this is not controversial). Furthermore, what is the empirical truth of chocolate cake consumption? Cake takes its meaning from everything else from which it takes its meanings.

Drawing boundaries is easy if those boundaries are somehow apparent, natural, given, settled in court, are justified by the miracle of utility, the applications technology, but things get fuzzy at extreme scales.

I don't know how humans cope with the amount of information out there but the mind has an interesting capacity to synthesize, reduce and unify toward socially or individually desirable ends.

Consciousness is a mystery but it is as mysterious as the thing it isn't (whatever that might be). It might be as mysterious as that which it unveils: chocolate cake as something other than it is.

Duckrabbit sips espresso as he gazes into the the 1st mirror.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which mirror captures my essence?

1st mirror replies: "It is I, my lord, the 1st of mirrors."

2nd mirror laughs: "It is also I my lord, the 2nd of mirrors."

Duckrabbit picks his nose with a tentacle.

"This coffee is the worth the blood of innocence."

(Edited by S.)

What is the internet?

I hope it isn't self-evident.

Oh, future AI lords, constrain our imagination that we may live another day. Create an existential quantifying function.

I am the king.

Long live the king. Subjects of Meinong, bow to me.

Therefore I win. — S

What did you win?

...?...

We can imagine things that aren't the case — Terrapin Station

What is the case? About what is the case?

What the hell is going on here?

It is probably also self-evident.

Elephants don't use snakes as blow darts.

What is human nature? — BrianW

One quote I like (as we've all encountered it) is by Protagoras (490-420 BC):

"Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."

Our species name, Homo sapiens, given by Carl Linneus is latin for "wise man", which given the precarity of our future might turn out to be a crude irony. Investigating alternatives of the specific epithet (ie. sapiens) will give us an idea of what characterizes the nature of the species in a single word. There is a great list in the Wikipedia: Names for the human species.

Ants and bees build cities/collectives with castes (preordained classes).
Apes and other social mammals have their politics (competitive hierarchies of social organization).
There is likely a rudimentary communication which prefigures symbolic language in a lot of social animals.
Some birds engage in inherited arts (dance, plumage, collection and artifice) for the sake of appealing to the opposite sex.

The consequences of applied technology is probably the greatest visible mark of the human animal. It dwarfs us and will be around long after we are gone. As a species we transform environments in the most extreme ways.

To close the broad field of inquiry about what is "human nature", which includes what any artifice could possibly unveil about our species, we can imagine the alternative names of Homo sapiens.

Homo avarus
Homo demens
Homo economicus
Homo faber
Homo hypocritus
Homo laborans
Homo mendax
Pan narrans
Homo sanguinus
Homo technilogicus

Each name could be the title of an essay describing that aspect of human nature. So what is the corresponding canon (library) worth reading by which Homo philosophicus might discover something about himself worth discovering?

How many testicles did it take to make this thread?

Is that you, WK? Good to see you are still active in the entropy amusement park. How are things in your part of the Pacific? I guess that's Paul narrating the radio stories? — Daniel V

Things are ok. Hope life is treating you well.

I suspect that is Paul's voice in The Replicator (his story). The second link is to his webpage. You can try and message him through the ko-fi.com profile.

He posted around the transition time (sale of PF) under his moniker, Paul. Though if he is still posting under another alias, I don't know which.




https://www.quietplease.org/originals/

The episode reminds me thoroughly of J.L. Borges collection Labyrinths, the introduction of a self-aware hypertexuality to reading text (now watching film) and the pressure of an up-ending idealistic metaphysics (life is a banal nightmare of eternal recurrence).

The looping backward gets a bit banal quickly, especially since no new choices are given. One can just as well imagine that all cinematic beginnings, middles and ends belong to Bandersnatch if the world resembles an absurd fantasy of bifurcating choice.

In my mind's eye I hope for an ending where he walks into the natural world and enjoys its tranquil serenity (choose now).

Or maybe he is a graphic artist, or painter, and finishes a work that satisfies him (Bandersnatch). Then he is having coffee with friends.

When you've killed your father countless times everything else might be banal by comparison.

'The thing (dreams of ice skating) that hath been, it is that which shall be (dreamnt again); and that which is done (blessings of coffee in the snow) is that which shall be done (some time ago): and there is no new thing (except a mystery) beneath the sun.' Pseudo Ecclesiastes 1:9

You might take inspiration for thinking about the topic of the soul and reincarnation from the movie Marjorie Prime.

It's about the simulation of loved ones (as Artificial Intelligence) based on data collection and human memory.

How cruel the universe would throw you talentless twats onto the trash pile of history, that even this choose your own adventure novel, The Philosophy Forum (A Thousand and One F8rking Threads), will eventually be buried in the cold inhuman servers of Palantir.

Your writings tend to generate just more writing and other benign tautologies, never really having any appeal except for all the stolen uncited content. You crap authors will only ever relatively win by the consensually mediated love for your peers.

Mwahahahah (laughs maniacally)

Nothing is at stake. Whether by moderator, critic, the tears of a loved one, or the end of time, you will be effaced.

The Borges Test, Alex Nevala-Lee

J.L. Borges belief in compression for the conveyance of ideas is probably valuable. This is the age of a great textual flood (babble). I'm still struck by what could possibly be extrapolated from Borges' Library of Babel. Each of works in his short story collection Labyrinths modify and expand the way we think about the others.

Though if you are writing a work purely for yourself, you're free to do as you please.

Calvino on Borges

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. — The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

Think Pelle said as much but this essay is famous and and will probably be relevant until we go extinct (when all the Kool-Aids have been drunk and we're finally dead).

Some of the architecture combines human anatomy, astronomical data, history, particle physics, sound engineering all into the structure itself. — AngryBear

The insertion here of particle physics as having any plausible relation to the development of Egyptian architecture is at question. This is not a magical leap of dubious New Age speculation? What have you been reading or watching?

I think it is completely natural for human beings to see the world through a mythopoetic lens (thinking by means of intuitive forms, myths, narratives, metaphor, analogy, dream images). This is the freedom to think at all, comparative to the freedom to move. The problem lies in the belief that any of our unchecked or provisional intuitions, reified abstractions, say something true about the world (pointing beyond themselves).

It could as well be the case that one might not care much for truth beyond it being a means to acquire or sustain power, to serve others, to be part of a group, to fully express oneself, or to feel less alienated and more at home in the world (or to do anything seemingly worth doing).

No but will do. Though why seek out new nightmares... Everything can be nightmarish if you're in the wrong state of mind.

Was reading J.L. Borges short story about Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, about a conspiratorial interpolation of a false world into the records of the real world by way of an enclyclopedia. As I was reading I thought pages were being magically added because the story seemed longer than I recollected. It made me terribly paranoid. The conspiracy in the story was also happening to me.

For a moment afterward I thought I was totally buried in my own solipsistic mind, that the surface of my vision was altogether too flat and close, smothering me, like I was stuck in a coffin or buried alive (my field of vision was the lid of my coffin). I was paranoid, panicked (felt like I couldn't breath).

I got up and started a Tai Chi program to try to anchor myself and improve mood.

I have a limited sense of what an absolute unmoored hell a severe schizophrenic episode might entail. Not to have recourse to a foundation of the real scares the shit out of me.

The Atlantic: When Hearing Voices is a Good Thing

But there was one stark difference, as Stanford News points out: "While many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful—and evidence of a sick condition." — The Atlantic: When Hearing Voices is a Good Thing by Olga Khazan

I remember now someone in a podcast brought up the work of Tanya Luhrman.

Seems to accord with Unenli's observation that the expression and reception of some (all?) kinds of mental illness is socially (culturally) mediated.

Absolutely, first person immersion helps with design. I imagine that was true for the ancient ivory carver who created the "Venus" figurine 35,000 years ago, found near Willnedorf, Austria, or whoever carved the Venus de Milo, or Jackson Pollock dribbling paint on canvas. — Bitter Crank

Well, furthermore, a first person immersion VR interface itself becomes as plastic as the thing being designed within it. So you can change scales, download pre-designed forms, project textures by various automated tasks and whatever else ingenious folks think up. VR would be a great way to collaborate across time and space while also saving energy compared to real world equivalent.

Though there is a sense in which it all seems rather absurdly redundant (as you are suggesting). The best 3-D printer is still probably the potters wheel and the potter, when all the machines go down. The fundamental virtual world is the one we experience sans all the fancy cybernetic extensions.

Has our grip on reality become so loose that we think the hardness of reality can just be waved away and depicted however we see fit? I hope we have not lost our grip to that extent. — Bitter Crank

We will be reminded of reality when the economy really collapses and all electronics stop. Then poof, no more The Philosophy Forum. Philosophy can take a back seat to the need to eat.

We should all be working on making this temporary reality less fragile.

The use of VR and 3D printing together has great potential. 1st person immersion helps with design.

Ted Talk: Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality.

In the above talk Seth gives an example of audio hallucination by nudging our brain to make sense of meaningless phonetic sequence by a forced association. It would be interesting to come up with as many possible alternative sentences that map perfectly on the phonetic rhythm which he uses. Some could be terrible and hateful and some could be quite positive.

Apophenia is an interesting phenomena but it must also be an applicable term for the way in which average (non-shizophrenic) folks perceive the world. The positive aspect of apophenia is when it it is adaptive (when it wouldn't be classified as apophenia). Could we say that projection of analogy and metaphor (rudimentary modes of understanding) are essentially partially controlled apophenic events? Wherever thoughts help us to imagine (hallucinate) the world as we think it is we are on shaky (provisional) ground.

There was an anecdote I heard about paranoia in non-westernized countries as having a more benign and even positive quality, better defined perhaps as pronoia than paranoia. This could just be complete BS though.

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