Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.
The fundamental starting point that the universe is objectively indifferent. Nothing matters to it, which ultimately means that we humans are the only ones ascribing subjective values. Good, bad, happy, sad. Any purpose in life is human made, we are what makes things matter - giving our corner of the universe the ability to think, feel, want etc.
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
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.
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".
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.
When forced to choose, minimizing harm should always be prioritized over maximizing good. I more mean this in terms of utilitarianism, but even outside of that framework, improving things seems to cause more problems than working towards equity, and once equity is closer it is easier to improve things after.
If we don't have to kill and abuse others we should not do it just for pleasure.
Consciousness is not material.
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
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.
Live and let live. Easy as pie.
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The best way to get what you want is to provide it to others. It works for love and compassion but it’s also good material advice. If you truly love bread, become a baker and you’ll have the most. Even if you just bake bread casually at home and give it to friends, you’ll still have bread around all the time.
Time is likely B-theoretic, not A-theoretic. There is no absolute simultaneity, so the relations between points in time are probably best described in the B-theory.
Substance dualism is a silly conjecture, and neutral monism is just a sad attempt to grant legitimacy to shoddy arguments about mental constructs existing as some kind of concretia. It's dualism in sheep's clothing.
The only thing sillier than substance dualism is substance idealism.
Universals are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nominalism and particularism are better views of what actually exists.
There is no such thing as an essentially ordered series. While they're useful abstracts, in reality all series are accidentally ordered.
Of the four causes, only material and essential usefully describe anything. Formal and final causes are, again, only useful in the abstract.
I could go on, but I doubt anyone's still awake...
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.
I have a saying, if the people no longer respect the government rules, shall the state end up in anarchy.
I've always thought that what makes me the most happy is trying not to care about material things. Just stuff I make myself is what I care about most. I made my own music player app and it's garbage compared to everything else available but I still love it. I feel like this is a pretty popular opinion to hold though.
“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.
"Free will", as almost anyone defines it, is completely indistinguishable from no free will.
Also: The universe exists as a manifestation of pure math. In the same sense that the answer to "What is 9827349328659327498327592432^98374239563298473298324253?" exists even if nobody bothers to actually calculate it, the answer to "What does a universe with [these] parameters look like at t = 13.7 billion years look like?" exists as well - and it looks like you. A lot of people agree that it might be in principle possible to simulate the universe - even if it requires something silly like a computer larger than the universe. I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
The philosophical position I hold is that solipsism isn't true. Because to ask yourself if others exist requires language, which we all learn from other people. We can doubt our senses without language, but this is psychosis, not philosophy.
And I think most Western people haven't really solved the question of solipsism and still live in the Cartesian theater. And that this is a major reason why we're mindlessly killing the planet (and ourselves).
Apple and Android both need to exist. Apple isn't your friend and market privacy to take a market and when they have it they will shit on it. Google doesn't care about your privacy but are at least working on doing better and are trying to unite platforms.
Don't put your eggs in one basket.
This too shall pass. Enjoy what you can, but don't get attached to it. You can even become deeply involved in something or with someone, but always be emotionally and mentally prepared for the day when it or they are no more. Expect it.
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.
I think calling anything I think or hold to possibly be true a "belief" is not quite accurate. I don't really have faith or anything like that. I believe things that can be proven to be real, and I have ideas that may count as philosophy but without a belief that it is correct or not. Like, I think it's entirely possible for an afterlife of some such to exist. If matter and energy can not be destroyed, only transformed, and our consciousness is a form of energy, then maybe we still retain consciousness after death on a different level of existence which could be attributed to Heaven or Hell or any other religious idea of an afterlife. On the other side of the same possibility, I don't think a God is possible. God is either simply a convenient name for the randomness of the universe, or was an alien race not much different than us, but way, way more advanced technologically.
Is that really philosophical, though?
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Optimistic nihilism has always been a favorite. While there may be a purpose to existence, there is no concrete evidence of it. But if indeed life has no meaning, that's not a big deal, because humans are creative and can create our own.
Hard determinism. Everything is a number and has already happened. Also, one electron universe.
I think as renewable energy gets cheaper and we move away from scarcity in society, we will stop looking at ourselves as brands. Instead, personal conduct, or the appearance of such will play a much larger part in our public lives and place in society. This will provide a lot of privacy issues.
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Humanity is living in an (almost) endless painful cycle of civilisations rising, prospering and falling, like a phoenix rising from its ashes, only to burn again. No civilisation, nation, or idea can escape. Some might be able to avoid destruction for longer than others, but they will eventually meet their end.
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Death is and should be inevitable, and it's a good thing. I have gotten over the fear of dying when I was eight, yet so many people, (way too many of them are adults) seem to treat death as a sensitive and even taboo topic.
I find the thought that I'll most likely be able to rest peacefully either in a state of non-existence or some sort of afterlife to be calming. I tend to think that the acknowledgment of our own mortality is the only thing that makes us truly enjoy life, as we know it won't last forever. This is the reason why people talking about technology that could make immortal people without thinking about the downsides enough really concerns me. Humans are supposed to be born, to live and to die. -
If we want to define whether an action is immoral or moral, then as a rule of thumb, it is moral as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. (yes, this includes non-human animals) There are a lot of exceptions of course.
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Humans are not superior to other animals. The reason I think that, in general, killing another human is worse than killing another animal is not that human lives matter more than lives of other animals, but instead that you shouldn't kill your own species.
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