mfed1122
@mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 3 days ago:
Yes that’s true, and I did think about this, but really this just makes the image even dumber, because we can see atoms nowadays too, and even if we couldn’t, all our knowledge of them would still come from what this comic implies is our hallucination 🤔 kinda crazy to say that if you just zoom in on a hallucination it suddenly becomes real
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 3 days ago:
I also have read quite a bit of philosophy! So this should be fun to discuss.
First, I agree that 100% certainty is virtually impossible. However, there comes a point when we say we’re “certain”, depending on the severity of the outcome and the probability of it.
For instance, if I offered for you to play a game where we spin a big spinner, and 99.9999999999999% of the wheel is red, which means you pay me ten thousand dollars, and the rest of it means I pay you ten thousand dollars…you’d probably not say “I might win ten thousand dollars!” You’d probably say “this forces me to give you ten thousand dollars”. And if I said “whaaaat, no, we can’t be certain of that!”, you’d probably think I was being nonsensical.
So let’s acknowledge that while Descartes’ arguments for solipsism are indeed basically undefeated on a first order logic basis, we really should be evaluating the claim on a probabilistic or statistical basis instead, since the argument is fundamentally about our degree of sureness in something.
You’re correct that ultimately my senses alone are my only exposure to the world. However, there are some interesting things I can notice. If I lock 1000 people in a room with an undetectable poison gas, then they all will die - even though none of them had any sensory awareness of the gas! If it was just one person in the room, maybe we could argue that reality isn’t consistent, but the fact that all 1000 people due suggests that the gas affects everyone the same consistent way. Similarly, a blood clot in my leg can kill me even if I’m not aware of it.
Acknowledging now that things can certainly affect things regardless of their sensory awareness of each other, the only way to preserve our radical doubt of our senses is to suspect that perhaps the 1000 people in my room are actually not really people, but instead something me and my senses have imagined. If we suppose (against all other evidence, mind you, and purely on the basis of being able to achieve an impossible100% certainty to the contrary), that my senses really do deceive me at every turn, then we have other situations that will puzzle us:
For example, I’m studying math as a 7 year old and coke across a fancy integral equation, which I absolutely cannot make sense of, and I don’t even know what the symbols mean. Later in life, in my 20s, I have learned enough math to understand the equation, and remarkably, I see that it made sense all along. The equation was always right, even before I had the mental capacity to understand it. How could this be, if my perception of the world was not mapping to some consistent reality? These are things that we must come up with strange explanations for, like claiming that my consciousness actually fully understands all workings and states of the universe, and I’m only playing a game with myself where I pretend to forget about it, or something like that.
And if we were to make such a fantastical interpretation for the world as that, what would be our evidence for that interpretation as opposed to the “default” one that the world is self consistent and maps consistently to the our sensory interpretation? Our evidence could only be “we can’t prove with 100% certainty that this isn’t the case”! But if that’s a good reason to believe things, I could just as well say that we can’t prove with 100% certainty that my default interpretation isn’t the case either, and now our claims (and any claim) are on equal footing - since nothing can be 100% certain. All that this really does is show to us that this justification is completely useless, as it makes all claims equally viable and negates itself.
- Comment on No like really bro I’m just here for the silly shoes 3 days ago:
Behold, an old fat fuck! (Chris Martin)
- Comment on 3 days ago:
By god I think he might be on to something
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 3 days ago:
There certainly are pseudoscientific interpretations of it like that, which many laypeople subscribe to.
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
I was wondering who would bring up quantum physics 🥲
I don’t subscriber to any interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so to me any insights that this field may offer still don’t support that reality is subjective. Reality could be only locally real but still objective and consistent. And it sure seems that it is, in at least 99.999…% of all situations, especially situations that actually matter to us. Just my understanding, not a quantum physicist lol
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
Oh I’m not arguing that reality is different from how we perceive it. Just arguing with the sneaky little trick where people say “reality isn’t what we perceive… Therefore reality is subjective”
- Comment on we're cooked 4 days ago:
Yeah the posting of it on Lemmy is def a 3. Whoever created the original post though… Ehhh. We dunno where the og meme came from. I doubt it was made by a lemming
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
Well I stopped observing it so it should now be 50/50
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of “purpose” or “reason” is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the “purpose” of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like “I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet”. Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn’t need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since “purpose” aka “reason for being” is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.
Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be “to be entertaining”.
So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn’t one.
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the “meaning” to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I’m blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can’t smell), etc.
I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.
- Comment on "Trippy" Reality 4 days ago:
All this brain hallucinating reality stuff pisses me off because people use it as a springboard to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me. There is a uniform and self-consistent reality which we all have only limited perceptual awareness of. The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality, not to fabricate wishy-washy arguments for how that reality doesn’t exist or doesn’t have meaning
- Comment on Guy just wants some cookies 4 days ago:
But must we imagine him happy?
- Comment on we're cooked 4 days ago:
Conspiracy brain thinks of a few reasons:
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To preemptively establish what “real crazy” looks like so that we tolerate what he’s actually saying and doing more
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To muddy the lines between fake and real so that everyone is too confused to fact check anything
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Garden variety people being stupid and wanting to exaggerate something because exaggeration=funny, and they’re not aware of the harm this does
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To bait the left into accepting the same sort of “the fact that this is believable (to me) PROVES that this is valid possibility and worldview” mentality that the right adopted a decade ago, which ultimately makes people much easier to manipulate
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To position the left as yet another entity that promotes its views via misleading “jokes” that on the one hand legitimately misinform people, but when called out can be defended as “just a joke that you were too stupid to recognize” - that is, borrowing another successful but evil strategy that the right has recently made use of
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- Comment on we're cooked 4 days ago:
You’ve gotta understand how for the many people who already saw that post, for you to say that this one “is real”, which could be interpreted as an escalating followup post, is extremely misleading to the point of dishonest. You can’t just be like “yeah bro this post is real” and then point to a literally different post which is substantially less alarming.
- Comment on Did you do this at your highschool? 1 week ago:
Brooo classic orbing
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
This comment couldn’t feel more like a moody 16 year old wrote it. It’s youtube comment level bad with the added content of lemmy.world (which only makes it worse). The inability to write “you" without failing, the wording, the “cringe”, the lack of self-awareness… and I’m sure you have absolutely no idea how much of a cringe teen your made yourself look like by writing it.
(Okay I’ve done my part, let’s please make this a copypasta on Lemmy now)
- Comment on You know what, fair enough. 2 weeks ago:
Jesus Christ I read the roles exactly backwards I’m a moron
- Comment on You know what, fair enough. 2 weeks ago:
No, but I don’t see how that is what’s depicted in the meme anyways? Who would be being clingy or using sex as a motivator here? Perhaps I’ve completely misunderstood this
- Comment on You know what, fair enough. 2 weeks ago:
I have never known any of the personalities depicted in this joke and suspect that it is a complete fabrication that only seems funny or relatable if one is used to imagining the world according to their wishful thinking
- Comment on pirate shit 2 weeks ago:
Its tricky because I don’t dislike this post, but I do feel like posts should be in the appropriate comms. And I’m just legitimately unclear on what belongs here. I guess the idea is just whatever people post?
- Comment on pirate shit 2 weeks ago:
Is there any type of post that doesn’t belong in a shitposting community? Because I know some people have very strong opinions about what shitposting is around here. And personally, I don’t think this fits
- Comment on That's how the world works. 2 weeks ago:
I don’t even agree with this but I’m upvoting because I hope Lemmy becomes more open to hearing nuanced takes on this. Capitalism is complicated. It’s not God, it’s not Satan
- Comment on Genius. 3 weeks ago:
Me realizing with horror that “burned down” and “burned up” are often completely interchangeable
- Comment on Do people actually need a place to confess things anonymously? 3 weeks ago:
So can other people even see the post? Can I view other posts by most recent, or any other order? I think there’s appeal to the idea of anonymously confessing things. 4chan and many other imageboards are built on this. Can also do it on many other websites by just making alt accounts. I think you need to more clearly think through what unique benefit your proposed idea would provide.
- Comment on Share this with 5 people or it gets ya 3 weeks ago:
Winner for me. Recently watched this show over someone’s shoulder on an airplane. Had to be the unfunniest most insufferable shit I ever saw. Probably the first thing I hated more than Seinfeld
- Comment on Share this with 5 people or it gets ya 3 weeks ago:
Also applies to cloud infrastructure
- Comment on German man says american are savages 4 weeks ago:
Bro is the Uncle Roger of Germans
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Honestly everything other than variety and scale of communities. It’s not as big of a compliment as it sounds like though - Reddit is almost unspeakably shitty. Pay a visit to the front page or whatever they call it now and be greeted by nothing but ragebait, hornybait, gender war content, political discussion with zero critical or individual thinking, and 500 popular communities that are completely undifferentiated because they form a singular bland monoculture circle jerk that just repackages the day’s hot topic in whatever shoehorned way it can into every subreddit (Lemmy is starting to do this too though yay…). The only difference between it and tiktok is the UI tbh
