Ask Lemmy

Everyone should be able to do whatever makes them happy, so long as what makes them happy does not unreasonably infringe upon the happiness of another.

The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.

If we don't have to kill and abuse others we should not do it just for pleasure.

I believe that housing, education, food, and healthcare should be universally guaranteed.

“Consciousness” is not a multitude instances of which you have one of, it’s something singular that has you.

We are all the same weird mirror rippling through space-time trying to figure out how to outfox entropy.

We aren't special. Conciousness is a side effect of having so many neurons shaped by millions of years of social and environmental darwinism. We are actually barely concious to avoid confronting the fact that we are just walking meat.

If human head transplants were done, we would have proof that the soul is just a sophisticated algorithm held within our meat, but even then, our barely concious state will refuse to compute the actual implications.

Human cognition/consciousness is not special. There have likely been many now-extinct intelligent species whose evolutionary niche did not encourage the indefinite expansion and subsequent habitat destruction that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, other intelligent species will likely evolve after we are extinct. There is also no reason to believe that consciousness is unique to biological creatures, although mechanical sapience will most likely look very different from ours.

Consciousness is not material.

Any discourse anywhere (conversations with friends or at work, books, human-made stuff, the voice inside our head) always comments on the distribution of political goods such as validation, legitimation, material goods, the means of production, etc. Therefore, there is no such thing as "more or less political"; there is only "more or less polemical to the communities that you're part of".

Truth and falsehood can overlap. In other words, that contradictions can be true. The reason for this is paradoxes like the liar's paradox. The sentence, "this sentence is false," is both true and false at the same time in the same sense. Building on that, mathematics made the wrong choice philosophically when they modified the axioms of set theory instead of changing the logic in which it was embedded and keeping naive comprehension and extensionality

Optimistic Nihilism.

Consciousness is an accident, the universe is an emergent property of physical laws, and there is no purpose to any of it; no gods, no guiding intention, no natural morality, no afterlife. Just entropy.

This is a good, positive thing to understand.

If there is no intrinsic morality, then we are free to define morality for ourselves. This is a burden, but it something that we can recognise and think critically about, rather than just taking whatever tradition we were raised in, and picking and choosing as is convenient.

If there is no afterlife, then every act of alturism, every kind thing we do we can do because we want to. Not because we are afraid of damnation, but because we decided that it was the right thing to do.

If we leave nothing behind but dust, then we must be aware of the impact we have now, because our time is limited and brief.

If we are a random collection of atoms, a brief coherent pattern among the chaos, then we can recognise that every single other person is the fundamentally the same.

Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.

If you don't directly pay for a product but engage with it, you are still supporting it. You are driving up user metrics, generating ad revenue, creating content for others (videogames, social media). It's complete nonsense to claim you are against something but then continue to use it

This does apply to the current Reddit situation but I formulated this view a while back after quitting Gacha games, people playing those titles looooooove talking about how they would never pay a penny due to the evil monetization but they have no qualms about recruiting friends, writing positive reviews, being content for paying players to lord over, creating guilds etc.

I hate the state of our world as it is right now. It's been itching inside my head for quite some time alreadu. It probably is somewhat political, because it probably has something to do with capitalism, but I can't understand how a population that has never been so productive still has to work their ass off in order to simply eat and lay in a bed safely. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes and the more I hate how natural it is for seemingly everyone around me.

I'm not one of these people, despite also not being wealthy at all, I have a job, I don't get paid top dollar but I have a safe house, food on the table and I can do a little bit more with my money, and yes, that's it, EVERYTHING seems to revolve around money.

Probably not all that groundbreaking, but I hadn’t thought of it until recently:

Brutality is a function of societal evolution. The societies that grow and expand do so, not only because of some technological or cultural advancement, but in large part due to their willingness and propensity to conquer and dominate other societies, often in brutal ways.

Peace is hard, in part, because the human desire for power is baked into all the major remaining people and cultures- any society that leans towards peace will eventually be overtaken by one that doesn’t.

Free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.

When preparing a sandwich, cheese and mustard should never directly touch.

That there is absolutely nobody and nothing in this world that wants to do me harm or ruin my day. Stuff happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Nobody is out to get you, everyone has something more important to do.

I don't believe in free will meaning that what ever you did you could not have done otherwise. We live in a deterministic universe and all events are part of a causal chain

It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they'd still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.

Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I'm not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don't think I died, even though there's this huge gap in my mind and the "me" from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn't necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.

Life after death! Neat.

Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.

So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?

So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she's only like ~80% accurate then that's just fine. I'd much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol