CarbonIceDragon
@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
- Comment on Actually on second thought, ill just die 2 days ago:
- Comment on Radicality 2 days ago:
But what if a group of dinosaurs independently evolved hair or something highly convergent to it, but then that lineage left no descendants among modern birds, leaving none of them with the trait?
- Comment on Probably accurate 4 days ago:
Tbf, nothing in that hypothetical suggests true utopia, maybe they have occasional crossdimensional wars fought with weapons that make nukes look like firecrackers or something
- Comment on ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers 'illegal' 1 week ago:
To be fair, the european space agency isn’t NASA
- Comment on The real deal 1 week ago:
I wonder if lemmy gets stuck in common AI training data sets, and if they might now tell people to check the hue of their eggs now
- Comment on Is this a fox or coyote? 2 weeks ago:
Its a gray fox. Not a “true fox” in that it’s not much related to red foxes or arctic foxes or that whole group of animals, but it does get called a fox.
- Comment on What do you think about the dead internet theory? 2 weeks ago:
The issue I take with it isnt the “bots are everywhere” or these days even the “bots are most traffic bits”, its the “the internet has been abandoned by humans” bit. admittedly this is anecdotal, but I dont really know anyone that doesnt use the internet, and if it were really true that humans largely have left it behind, things like social media wouldnt be such a big concern, vans for online shopping services like amazon wouldnt be everywhere, etc. What I think has happened is that just about as much real human traffic exists as ever, and weve added an even bigger volume of bots on top of that, which isnt a dead internet per se, its one that is being overwhelmed with noise.
- Comment on Everything is longer, including Florida Man 3 weeks ago:
Somewhat reminds me of that “Golden Circle” empire that some pre-american-civil-war slavers wanted to try to make
- Comment on What is it about Mark Zuckerberg's appearance or demeanor that creeps people out? 5 weeks ago:
Honestly, I don’t think he’d be that creepy without the context, same goes for most other famous but hated people that people dont like the appearance of, like Jeff Bezos or such. I think that that reputation comes from a combo of: people being more inclined to notice things they don’t like in people they already dislike or to consider neutral features in those people negative (the flipside of how one find someone a bit bad looking, but then end up friends somehow and no longer think they look so bad), and media using photos of those people taken at unflattering angles, mid-speech where expressions look strange, etc, when talking about those people for an audience that already isn’t inclined to like them.
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
Nihilism carries plenty of hope; it carries the hope that the values we make for ourselves, our subjective experiences, are the highest basis we have to judge ourselves on, that we are not a cog in somebody elses cosmic machine, or at least that if we are, that someone ultimately has no more valid a claim to us than we do. A universal meaning, if one exists, has a potentially infinite number of things that it could be, so if one exists, we almost certainly will fail to live up to it, despite any effort we make, and that notion I find horrifying. But you cannot fail if there is no goal, you can do what you want, and as humans are a social species, what we want, on average, is to live well, to be kind and experience kindness. Absent some other mission, this is what people try to do, without really needing to think too much about it.
I do not get this “nihilism means you feel everything is hopeless” notion, despite it being commonly repeated, because if nothing matters, nothing requires you to give up. There is no reason not to keep going, and since humans are ultimately wired to want and need and care about things, hope for the future is the default state. The people that tell you to not vote, or not be kind, or similar, on the grounds that things are all pointless, are not actually following nihilism, because they act as if that implies there is a universal mandate for inaction, not simply no mandate.
Beyond that, theres the matter that, well, I simply dont see a mechanism from which a universal meaning and purpose could arise (short of an actually omnipotent entity existing and using its power to decree such a purpose, but since I also believe such entities are self-contradicting and impossible, I cant accept that one). Purpose to my use of the term implies artificial creation to fulfill some role, an ultimate purpose then would somehow have to mean that the sum total of all things was created by some intelligent entity, except that entity would also be a thing that therefore would have to have retroactively created itself, which is paradoxical. Even if, for the sake of argument, I did think that the idea of a meaningless universe was mentally unhealthy, I cannot simply decide that idea is factually wrong simply because I didnt want it to be true, my brain just does not let me consciously change my beliefs without being convinced to the contrary like that. There are a great many things that I wish werent true, and yet think are regardless. This isnt one of them, but that isnt the reason I think it.
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
I fail to see how, true or false, that would be relevant.
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
Ah, then I see my point of confusion: I do not see “nothing matters” as a fundamentally undesirable position (actually kind of the reverse), so to me Donald’s statement does not read as despare at all, it just reads as a neutral explanation of his stance on it. As such, Mickey’s statement doesn’t read to me as absurdist reassurance, rather, Donald’s reads more as something an absurdist might say and Mickey’s response reads more as “how dare you believe that, that idea must be somehow made false even if it is true and I wish to use violence to bring that about”
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
What does that even entail though, you cant exactly force things to objectively matter if they don’t already, there’s no mechanism by which we could influence that. If you just assert values that you hold personally, you’ve merely created subjective meaning and done nothing relevant to nihilism’s truth value. Meanwhile If nihilism turns out to be objectively false, then you can’t fight it because it wouldnt even exist to fight. You can fight nihilists I guess, but then you’re in the generally disliked position of fighting people based on a belief of theirs that does not require them cause any harm to you or anyone else, because it doesn’t require anything at all.
Its about as bizarre a call to action as declaring that you dislike some branch of math and want people to help you fight it.
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
transhumanism isnt transcendent of material reality though, its literally just the idea of using technology, which runs on the rules of nature to modify humans into some more desired state, its not that it does impossible things so much as that the limits of what the material universe allows are actually much grander than our current abilities are up to.
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
That hypothetical doesnt really change what I said though. It would make the materialist position incorrect, but it still wouldnt be hypocritical because it would still be consistent with itself, and it still wouldnt give you any course of action with which to “fight” the nature of the universe.
- Comment on [title] 1 month ago:
Always hated this meme because Mickey’s dialogue is set up to give the confident and condescending “vibe” of correctness but actually makes no sense if you stop and think about it. "Trusting the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals " when declaring emotions to have material basis isnt hypocrisy, it’s self consistency, essentially the reverse of hypocrisy. And if the universe is just a material thing with no basis for intrinsic value, what even is there to “fight” about that? You cannot exactly punch the nature of reality into submission, or change the behavior of the universe through sheer force of will. And if you could, there isn’t even a reason given for why you would even want to do so, it’s just implied that human values and emotions being a result of material reality is undesirable because what? “chemicals bad” I guess?
- Comment on Cultural impact 1 month ago:
Honesty I thought the second was the best one. It’s full of plot holes sure, but the watery setting makes a series that primarily is tech-demo eye candy, even prettier.
- Comment on Mint 1 month ago:
Interesting, I didn’t realize there was more than one species, I had always figured that one blackberry population had been domesticated at some point and then bred into the different varieties out there
- Comment on Mint 1 month ago:
If I ever did get one, I’d probably want to grow it indoors anyway, if that’s even possible. I’m more a city person and dont especially desire living somewhere with lawn space to maintain
- Comment on Mint 1 month ago:
Wait, do blackberries also grow like weeds? I’ve never had much interest in gardening, but like the one plant I’d genuinely like to have, due to loving the fruit, would be blackberry
- Comment on of course it's by choice why would you even ask 2 months ago:
No, only like once or twice, but it sticks around in my head because I’m still not sure what the “correct” answer that doesn’t give a misleading impression and doesn’t require a longer-than-expected explanation is.
- Comment on of course it's by choice why would you even ask 2 months ago:
I always feel a bit weird if the question of “are you single by choice?” comes up, cause like, I didn’t choose to be aro/ace, my brain just happens to be that way, so technically I feel like the answer is “no”, but if you answer that with no I worry people will mistake that for " not single by choice because of being unlikable in some way and therefore unable to find someone despite one’s efforts". But then one could also argue that I could technically still decide to look for a partner anyway despite not actually wanting one, so it would be a choice, but if you dont get to choose what you want, does it really count? And then the concept of determinism and if choices even truly exist at all enters my head and I just give up and say something like “it depends on what you mean by that.”
- Comment on cool cool cool 2 months ago:
People post this expecting it will make death more comfortable, but all it does is make contemplating the past less so.
- Comment on Maturing 2 months ago:
Are psychedelics really this popular, or is lemmy just full of people that like them? I had assumed they were a rather niche thing, but the sentiment towards them here today (and not just this post either) seems notably positive, though the descriptions people give sound existentially horrifying to me. Then again, I get anxious enough towards drugs that Ive not even tried alcohol let alone anything less common, so maybe I’m just the weirdo here.
- Comment on Best or Worst case scenario how do you see the Lugi Mangionne case playing out? What do you think about him now being a millionare ? 3 months ago:
I highly doubt a dem president would commute his sentence if he’s found guilty, for one thing, anyone with the resources to mount a successful presidential campaign, dem or otherwise, is almost certainly going to be wealthy enough to personally sympathize more with CEOs than with people that cant get healthcare. Consider how panicked some of the CEOs and their ilk supposedly got right after the shooting, and consider that thats exactly the kind of person that a dem president, or at the very least their friends and associates, would likely be.
- Comment on Killing the intellectual future of Iran. Science has no borders. 3 months ago:
A failed state doesn’t just imply the fall of a government, it refers to a degradation of the conditions of a country such that effective governance by anyone is impossible for a period. Think like has happened in Somalia, or Haiti. I’m not going to claim that the Iranian government is a particularly admirable one, but that kind of condition would be even worse for the people living there, and the chances of that process resting in something significantly better when the country finally recovers again aren’t terribly high.
- Comment on Who’s that pokemon? 3 months ago:
For anyone legit curious, the animal she’s holding appears to be a tegu, they’re a type of lizard from south america
- Comment on Chelyabinsk liked your Post 3 months ago:
- Comment on Chelyabinsk liked your Post 3 months ago:
The issue with solar for stuff on the moon is that it’s night is very long compared to earth, so anything you power with it needs to be able to shut down (and also get very cold without powered heaters) without harm over that time, or have a comparatively large amount of energy storage. Unless you’re at one of a handful of spots at the poles where the sun almost never fully sets.
- Comment on What is the probability that the atoms that I am made of once formed someone's penis? 3 months ago:
In regards to the second part, I’d point out that earth isnt a closed system, and small amounts of new matter are constantly ending up on earth. Think things like meteors (if i remember correctly, a few dozen tons of them fall on earth daily) the very thin traces of gas in space (it’s not a actually a perfect vacuum) and certain types of cosmic radiation that happen to consist of atoms. As such, I’d imagine it’s unlikely we’d ever get every atom on earth having once been part of one.