The pondering is not an illusion. With the possible exception of epiphenomenalism, the pondering takes place, and the decision is the result of that. Given DBB style determinism, your decision to select chocolate was set at the big bang. Not true under almost any other interpretation, but under all of them (any scientific interpretation), the chocolate decision was a function of state just prior to the pondering, which does not mean it wasn't your decision.

Yes, I know it isn't a true illusion. I said it's a "functional illusion", meaning that since the chocolate conclusion was set at the Big Bang (as you noted), no amount of pondering vanilla was going to result in it's selection, or at least as you correctly noted at the mind state just before the pondering started. Thus while we all agree pondering occurs, as I mentioned, folks disagree whether both sides of the internal argument can result in chocolate or vanilla on one hand or always chocolate on the other.

A distinction without importance since in reality there is no practical difference. My advice: choose the option that sits best with you worldview and move on (to questions that can actually make a difference here on planet Earth).

Agree, until you suggest that you are actually leveraging quantum randomness when doing something like urinal selection (which definitely has rules to it, and is thus a poor example), or rock-paper-scissors, where unpredictability (but not randomness) takes the day.

I concede that the term "randomness" in the context of this conversation is not true statistical Randomness, rather a placeholder term to describe the absence of a logical train of thought as pertains to decision making, pondering, if you will. Thus I'll take your "agree"ment and call it a day.

We can cut to the chase, everyone agrees that humans ponder decisions, weigh the pros and cons of possible choices. What folks disagree on is whether this pondering is a functional illusion, such that I was always going to select chocolate, never vanilla, regardless of going through the act of pondering my "choice". In this scenario one can never go back and make a different "choice", because the concept of "choice" was an illusion. It was always going to be chocolate. Most, however believe that pondering is functionally real and thus yes, they could have selected vanilla. There is no Real World way to prove it one way or another and the answer similarly has no Real World implication since it can only be demonstrated theoretically, never in reality. But I find it more psychologically coherent to believe what I perceive, then to assume my experience is an (unprovable) illusion.

Well, since the value of money (and thus economies) is inter-subjective and not objective, these values can increase indefinitely, if humans agree to give them those (inflated through our current eyes) values.

Sure, it exists, but decision making structures (both machine and biological) are designed to filter out the randomness out and leverage only deterministic processes. I mean, neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one

Yes, that's their design. And when someone is contemplating an important decision, they bring all of that design to bear on the problem. How much of our decision making prowess do we bring to deciding which urinal to use in the public bathroom? Very, very little. What is taking the place of that unused neurological function? Habit perhaps or pattern matching. But what about a novel (no habit nor pattern) yet unimportant "choice"? It may not fulfill the statistical definition of the word "random", but in the absence of a repeatable, logical train of thought, it functionally resembles "randomness".

I pretty much deny this. All evolved decision making structures have seemed to favor deterministic primitives (such as logic gates), with no randomness, which Truth Seeker above correctly classifies as noise, something to be filtered out, not to be leveraged.

Sure, unpredictable is sometimes an advantage. Witness the erratic flight path of a moth, making it harder to catch in flight. But it uses deterministic mechanisms to achieve that unpredictability, not leveraging random processes.

Exactly. I said you were "ignoring" randomness, your wording is "denying". Same thing. Just so you know, randomness exists, human denials notwithstanding.

It's not either/or. It's a percentage thing. Of course there's randomness involved, but in most important situations it's a tiny percentage of the process (thus why human behavior can be predicted better than chance, yet nowhere near 100& of the time). The lower one's perception of the importance of the decision to be made, the lower one's mental/logical input into the decision making process. Randomness takes up that slack. Think about it, how much effort do you put into decisions that you believe don't matter. Me? Not much.

Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice?

How? Because you're ignoring another major factor in Human Decision Making, namely randomness. That is, while commonly recalled (important) decisions are made totally or mostly on logical grounds, most minor to miniscule decisions aren't made after exhaustive consideration, since they're trivial or below. Which urinal do you choose at the airport? Could you have cjosen a different one under identical circumstances? I think: yes. The bigger question is: does it matter?

Being able to juggle theoretical thinking with the day to day aspects of life may be a fine art, or wisdom based philosophy

Yeah, both descriptors are reasonable. But regardless of which one we choose (or even a third one), basically you get out of life what you put in. Thus in my experience, it's totally worth the effort to maximize one's chance of thriving in the future, which after all is where we're all going to be for the rest of our lives.

This question can only be answered by an individual who has the perspective of knowing/experiencing two different time lines. Since noone has that perspective, the question cannot be answered with certainty. Though a very good approximation of the answer can be derived statistically, by calculating the difference between having 8.426 billion humans and 8.426 billion minus 1.

The problem is that learning from mistakes doesn't always occur. This is on a personal level and wider scale. In particular, I have always seen the study of history as important about striving to do things differently but humanity doesn't always learn from lessons of the past.

Exactly, very few get beyond the emotional component elicited by reviewing their past in order to access the learning points from those past events in order to develop the ability through pattern recognition, to predict (with a certain, imperfect degree of accuracy) how individuals and groups will respond to future situations. Thereby creating opportunities to position oneself to benefit from those events. Ultimately, creating a situation whereby the future attains the status of providing opportunities to exploit in order to further one's goals. A positive outlook.

What do you think and how do you manage ruminating on the past or fears about the future? What exactly is the 'now', as it is a slice of time between past and future?

To my view, there is no qualitative emotional difference between the past, future and the present. That is fears of the future could in another's hands, be joyful anticipation. Basically the past is (incompletely) known, the future is unknown (but can be predicted with some accuracy) and the present is experienced in Real Time.

A healthy strategy would be to acknowledge that the past can't be changed, but it can be examined for clues and cues from which to understand current and predict future events. Knowing the future is a Superpower of considerable value and anyone possessing even an imperfect version of it, would likely be on the road to current success and would probably view the future positively.

I'm a little unclear what it would mean for something like Germany to not be objective. Does this mean it is not an objective fact that German surrendered in WWII? Is it not an objective fact that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July, 4th, 1776? Are there objective rules to chess? What about objective truths of arithmetic (which is often considered a "game" like chess)?

I apologize for being difficult to understand. No, it is an objective fact that Germany surrendered in WWII. However, all nations, including the nation of Germany (what I specifically spoke of) do not exist objectively. They exist through mutual agreement between very large groups of humans. If those humans no longer agree that a nation exists, it doesn't. Try traveling to the USSR. Similarly, while it is an objective fact that murder is illegal essentially everywhere and is against the moral code of most humans, this fact is an amalgamation of many individual subjective viewpoints of a large group of humans.

I reckon it would be short of impossible to pin down an absolute Good outside of theist-oriented beliefs

If using just "short of impossible" means: functionally impossible, then we're in agreement. As to theisticly originated beliefs, they seem at first glance to be (internally) objective, after all they're written down right there in this physical Book. However, ultimately some human at some point originated the contents of the Book (leaving aside what or who inspired that human). Thus to a third person observer, which is everyone in the current era, the Book's contents are at least partially subjective.

As to your sentence, no I don't agree with it (as written), I'd put it thusly: Good/Evil and Right/Wrong definitely exist, not unlike the existence of money, Germany and Apple Corporation. Similarly, they are, like money very important both theoretically and practically. However, all of the above do not exist objectively, rather inter subjectively.

I'm a tad suprised that I have to point this out, but okay. Sure every society debates good vs evil, it's popular. However, what qualifies as "good" in Kabul and Amsterdam can be quite different (since good is subjective individually and inter subjective collectively). It's common for moral objectivists to trot out low hanging fruit such as murdering babies when attempting to demonstrate their worldview, since it has a >99% agreement rate among "normal" folk. But ignore topics like welfare assistance which has a 40/60 split.

And that's an opinion, perhaps. But it's what we agree upon.

Actually your comments don't counter mine. I said "good" is subjective, you're saying a majority have (subjectively) agreed on some common meanings of "good". The two are compatible.

"Good", like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, that is, it is a subjective (and relative) descriptor. It can mean many and different things.

Veganism? A fine topic, I suppose, but hardly the yardstick by which morality is measured.

Care to elaborate or provide some examples/proof, beyond just conclusions/opinions?

IMO you are absolutely correct on the subject matter you stipulated, namely: what makes us "find a person attractive". My point is that what I believe this thread is about, specifically visual beauty, is but one component of that complex equation. I don't believe it's as important as the OP does, but it does deserve it's own discussion.

It's a question of perspective. From the perspective of third persons, say your family waiting at home, you are arriving having been cured. For them it is a miracle. From the perspective of the doctor and staff, they're creating facsimiles and they're committing murder. From your own perspective, you're murdered. From the facimile's perspective, they were cured and they're you.

Two things. First, while some can try to appear "deeper" by declaring that in their opinion human "beauty" goes well beyond what an eye can see, that just makes communication difficult when the subject matter under discussion has multiple definitions.

Second, when there are modern techniques to create beauty through surgery, drugs, exercise, cosmetics, fashion and Photoshop, the increase in the commonality of beauty, makes the absence of beauty more functionally important (see: incel).

The fact it mainstream media is awash with superficial messaging that beauty = good which bleeds into the morals, or lack thereof, of what the average person esteems towards

I agree with you that media is saturated with beauty, but we agree why that is, right? Media seeks to sell stuff. Beauty sells.

But do you really equate media with culture? I don't. Regardless, are you an "average person" that you reference above? I didn't think so. Sounds like we're in agreement.

I get what you're trying to say, but in my experience beauty (you're talking about human beauty) isn't necessarily "valued" highly, if highly means deeply. Rather beauty is easily and instantly recognized and thus appreciated. Though it's easy availability in the media, makes it rather superficial and thus not very valuable individually. Or to put it another way, if you're on a dating app you'll see any number of profiles showcasing "beauty", so you can go on an almost unlimited number of dates with beautiful people. However, the vast majority will be single dates because there's no connection (best case scenario), or something seriously wrong with your beautiful date. So whatever qualities your soulmate possesses is "valuable", because it's rare. Beauty isn't rare.

So having an opinion about an ad is drastically different than having an opinion about someone talking about an ad?

You're on the right track. A fake Mona Lisa is a reproduction than is tryimg to pass as the original (as opposed to a copy, which might just be an exercise taken by the painter as practice). Whereas a fake, fake Mona Lisa isn't the original, rather it can be an original piece of art that is, say a parody of the numerous attempts at faking the original.

Of course humans can find meaning in the meaningless. Haven't you seen animals in clouds? Are you familiar with the "deciphering" of Nostradomus?

I think you're vastly overestimating the value of truth and honesty, or vastly underestimating tolerance of cheating and lawbreaking if it is perpetrated by folks on "our side".

Especially now, in the Post Truth era.

Yes, the lag is real, but if you think about it a non-lag situation is essentially impossible. It's more about the size of the lag.

I'm not equating lag with the classic understanding of memories. Or to put it another way, the definition of the term "real time" is from the perspective of the individual, not a third person observer with a stopwatch.

Why? Because of the definitions of the words. Perhaps you're proposing at a certain point a facsimile becomes indistinguishable from an original.

Great viewpoint. Basically is there a difference between experiencing last Wednesday in real time (on Wednesday) and remembering Wednesday on Saturday? I say there is, that is living life is more than your memories at time X.

Exactly. The only unanswered question isn't: "is a facsimile an original?" It's: "is a person's self defined by more than it's physical body and it's memories?".

Well, if the transporter didn't kill you when you entered at the source (such that now there are two "yous"), everyone would call the machine a people fax instead of a transporter and you would be the original and the person at the destination would be the facsimile. Thus the "transporter" isn't a transporter at all, it's a fax machine that destroys originals.

Debating gun safety along the axes of murder victimhood vs murder prevention, while ignoring the reality that most US gun deaths are suicides, is missing the point.

No doubt, owning a gun decreases the average life expectancy of the owner. Mostly because gun ownership makes suicide attempts much more likely to result in death. And of course most gun deaths in the US are suicides (not murders). In addition, this effect is increased when gun related accidents (an admittedly small number) are added to the huge suicide number, since they are almost always situations where the gun owner and their family are the victims. The home defense benefit of guns is laughably tiny, statistically and plays essentially no relative role in increasing the life expectancy of gun owners, like myself. Basically, if you are at high risk of victimhood, whereby you "need" a gun for that purpose, you're likely going to benefit more from moving to a different location or modifying who you interact with and/or how you interact with them.

To me gun ownership makes sense if you're at very low risk of suicide and you get something positive out of the gun. Say hunting, target shooting, collecting, skeet etc.

For the purposes of the OP, conservative means Socially conservative.

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I don't know what that means, I'll just delete it.

Great puzzle. I think that...

When folks play dumb, sometimes I buy in and explain, other times I don't bother. It's only mildly annoying.

"Painting" can be a noun or a verb. Rothko's red rectangle is a noun. The guy with the roller is performimg the verb.