crt0o
@crt0o@lemm.ee
- Comment on Repost 8 hours ago:
Convergent would be two people coincidentally making the same meme
- Submitted 1 week ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 6 comments
- Comment on The D.E.N.N.I.S ship 2 weeks ago:
The lack of nonsensical capitalization gives it away
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
This basically reduces to some paradox of tolerance type shit, I’m a bigot because I discriminate against bigotry? Ok.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Well yes, the whole situation is complicated, I don’t advocate hatred towards religious people, I just think that religion should be criticised like any other ideology, and eventually left behind by society. I think that every person should have the privilege of growing up in a society that isn’t hateful and given the kind of education that would allow them to form their own beliefs, not just blindly inherit them. Sadly we are still far from that.
I used that as an example because it was the first thing that came to mind, I could have used any of the other million religious beliefs I disagree with, this isn’t about people, it’s about ideas
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Race and religion are fundamentally different, one is a trait you’re born with that you have no control over, the other is a (potentially harmful) ideology, which you have the power to distance yourself from. I’m sick of this “you need to respect everyone’s religion” bullshit. No, I cannot respect an ideology which promotes stoning gays, and anyone who does is a moron.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Understand that women in muslim families often have little freedom and that marriage with non-muslims is traditionally prohibited for them, if her family sees a problem with you, she could get beaten for that, locked inside the house, etc. It’s not something to mess around with.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
I agree with this idea that reality without a viewpoint doesn’t make much sense (maybe it’s not logically impossible, but our reality surely isn’t like that), but I don’t think an unconscious viewpoint can exist. Really, I would say having/being a viewpoint is precisely what consciousness is about.
It’s easy to think of reality as some space you can just freely float around (like your unity example), but that’s not how we experience it. The only viewpoints we can be absolutely sure actually exist, are our own. Let’s say we extrapolate to other conscious beings to avoid solipsism. This still severely constrains the pool of all known viewpoints, but what they have in common is this; their movement is always constrained to some body, which others percieve as matter. In my opinion this hints at the fact that matter is probably not merely some symmetry within how reality is observed. Since it correlates so well with where other viewpoints are (viewpoints are always located where matter appears to be), it makes sense to say that at least a subset of viewpoints appear as matter when viewed from the outside. I think this dissolves the idea that there is no object being observed.
The reason I’m calling reality subjective rather than relative is because I think the fact we can percieve it rather accurately and that human viewpoints are mostly coherent is more the exception than the rule. Take the hallucination example; when you hallucinate an object, what is being observed? I think the only possible answer is that the “viewpoint” in your head is observing some other stuff in your head. Since brain activity during visual hallucinations is very similar to brain activity when viewing a “real” object, this is likely always the case! What our brain is actually doing is collecting massive amounts of information from the environment and constructing integrated experience based on it, which represents the macroscopic features of reality accurately, because that was evolutionarily favourable. This means that the accurate and coherent perception we experience is likely only inherent to sufficiently complex evolved systems. If other viewpoints exist, they probably perceive reality in a completely different way than we do, and for all we know, they could be completely incoherent.
In short, my metaphysical stance is something like this:
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The only ontic thing is experience, which is concentrated into minds
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Reality is a plurality of interacting minds
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Observation is when one mind affects the experience of another
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Matter is what minds appear like from the outside
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Space isn’t some backdrop, but instead emerges from the relationships between minds, specifically the strength of interaction between them
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- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed. I’m not sure whether you’re assuming a physicalist or idealist position when you say “what we observe is the physical world”. My issue with this is that observation implies the existence of something which is being observed, the appearance upon observation, and possibly also an observer.
If you claim that the physical world doesn’t exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances (seems to me like a form of idealism), then what is being observed? If there is no object being observed, and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation, where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don’t cease to exist when they’re not being observed?
If you claim that the appearances don’t exist independently of the physical world being observed (the physicalist interpretation), why does the world appear different from different perspectives? How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?
The reason I brought up that example is because physicalists usually deny the existence of qualia and claim they’re nothing beyond the brain processes correlated with them.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
My line of thought is this: the most epistemically primary thing is subjective experience, because it can be known directly, thus it is undeniably real. Due to the principle of ontological parsimony, if everything can be explained in terms of experience, there is no reason to postulate something beyond it (the physical). So the way I would formulate the hard problem would be something more like “Why does our experience contain the appearance of a physical world at all, and how are they related?”.
I guess this might not resonate with you either, if you don’t believe in phenomenal consciousness as all. Personally I have a hard time understanding physicalist reductionism, how can you say that something like the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain? These are clearly very different things, and even if one is entirely dependent on the other, it doesn’t mean it’s non-existent or illusory.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
The reason is trying to work towards a model which could actually solve the hard problem, something which the physicalism prevalent in science has failed at completely. Consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, and it needs to be taken seriously, any model which doesn’t include it is either inacurrate or incomplete. Yes, a single particle might act randomly, but that might not hold for a more complex entangled system, especially an orchestrated one inside a living being.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
My idea is that the agent is the particle itself, and the laws of physics are simply the statistics of what decisions it tends to make. I imagine that if a fundamental particle like an electron was phenomenally conscious and had some kind of agency, it wouldn’t have any intention or self-awareness, so it would decide practically randomly, based on its quantum state, which would be some kind of rudimentary experience it has.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
You’re assuming quantum indeterminism is random in the sense that there is no agency behind it, but there is no evidence of that. If anything, the fact we feel like we have free will suggests there might be some agency somewhere, and if it manifests anywhere, that is as indeterminism at the fundamental level.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 weeks ago:
The laws of physics are not deterministic at the fundamental level, we clearly experience some kind of agency, so doesn’t it make sense to assume that it could be the origin of this indeterminism?
- Comment on Thoughts? 4 weeks ago:
Brain rod: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
- Comment on Denying the Human Sex Binary Turns Biology into Nonsense 2 months ago:
Biology isn’t even relevant here, we’ve surpassed evolution, there is absolutely no reason why someone shouldn’t change their gender if they want to. Apart from that, I find it hilarious how confident conservatives are about this, the situation isn’t that simple, there is a number of naturally present aneuploidies including the sex chromosomes. Even in the usual XX and XY variants, parts of the Y chromosome are homologous to X and the expression of sex-specific genes is modulated by epigenetic factors. In practice the concentrations of the sex chromosomes are not on/off and can vary fluidly. With these simplifications, you are just displaying your ignorance of biology.
- Comment on The therapy I can afford 2 months ago:
It’s under your profile > personalization > memory, but I think it’s off by default
- Comment on Carcinization goes brrrr 2 months ago:
Step 1: start with noise Step 2: make it look a little more like a crab Step 3: repeat step 2
- Submitted 3 months ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 1 comment
- Comment on They lied to me 3 months ago:
Why would anyone put mould on such a delicious treat anyways
- Submitted 4 months ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 5 comments
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
The fact that this man is a father is sad
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 1 year ago:
Yes, I agree it seems scary, but all it really means is that morality is not universal but specific to humans. You could say everything is inherently morally permissible in the sense that there is no higher power which will punish you for your actions, so essentially there is nothing preventing you from committing them. In short, the universe doesn’t give a shit what you do.
Still, your actions do have consequences, and you are inevitably forced to live with them (pretty much Sartre’s viewpoint). Because of this, doing things you think are wrong is often bad for you, because it causes you emotional pain in the form of guilt and regret, and also usually carries along negative social repercussions which outweigh the value of the immoral act in the first place. You could say that people are naturally compelled to act in certain ways out of completely selfish reasons. In this sense, I prefer to look at morality more as a “deal” between the members of a society to act in a certain mutually beneficial way (which is fueled by our instincts, a product of evolution), than something universal and objective.
The reason I doubt in our current understanding of consciousness is because I find its distinction between what is conscious and what isn’t quite arbitrary and problematic. At which point does an embryo become conscious, and how can something conscious be created from something unconscious? The simplest explanation I can imagine is that consciousness is present everywhere and cannot be created nor destroyed. This view (called panpsychism) is absolutely ancient, but seems to be gaining some recognition again, even among neuroscientists.
As you mentioned, “cogito, ergo sum” might be the only real objective truth that philosophy has uncovered so far. I am an optimist in that I believe surely more than one such truth must exist. If it was only discovered 400 years ago, surely there is more to be found. Maybe it is possible to collect some of these small fragments and build some larger philosophical theory from them, one that will be grounded in fact and built up using logic. I guess only time will tell.
And yes, of course some abstraction is beneficial in order to make sense of the world, even if it isn’t completely correct or objective.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 1 year ago:
The issue I see with these theories is that this idea of inherent value they all arrive at is very abstract in a way. What does it even mean for something to have inherent value, and why is it wrong to destroy it?
Another problem is that we talk about destroying life without even fully understanding it in the first place. What if life (in the sense of consciousness) is indestructible?
The way I see it, people accept that life has some inherent value because our self preservation instinct tells us that we don’t want to die and empathy allows us to extend that instinct to other living beings. Both are easily explained as products of evolution, not rational or objective, but simply evolutionarily favourable. All these theories are attempts to rationally explain this feeling, but they all inevitably fail, as they’re (in my opinion) trying to prove something that simply isn’t objectively true.
Anyways, I feel like even if you accepted any individual theory that seems to confirm our current understanding of morality and stuck with it fully, you would come to conclusions which are completely conflicting with it. For example in the case of utilitarianism, you could easily come to the conclusion that not donating most of your money to charity is immoral, as that would be the course of action which would result in the largest total amount of pleasure.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 1 year ago:
You can make ethical arguments based in reason.
Come on, I’d love to hear some, also the stakes are still up if you can give me a rational argument why killing is wrong.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 1 year ago:
Why is killing wrong in the first place? I bet you can’t find a single rational reason. That is because ethics isn’t based on reason, but instead on emotion. Given that, I don’t find it very surprising that it’s often very hypocritical.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 1 year ago:
Ah yes, good old hay … delicious!
- Submitted 1 year ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
