#thought experiments

[drawfee-quot3s]

the disintegrated man is a man who was born? and the swamp man was formed from marsh molecules that were struck by lightning

- jacob

[eriquin]

WIP Weekend

Tagged by @hbyrde36 and @turinspeachjam.

Rules: Send me an emoji in an ask, and I'll write & share 3 sentences for that WIP!

👑 Crown of Thorns

🔮 The Oracle of Roane County

🐈‍⬛ Cat's in the Cradle

💭 Zeno's Paradox

I have my progress graph:

And snippet from Zeno's Paradox behind the cut.

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie muttered. He leaned back on the couch and rubbed the side of his face that wasn’t covered in bandages. “So we don’t actually have any money yet, but we’re gonna?”

“So they say.” 

He let out a little laugh. “Well, then I guess this was all worth it.” He gestured at himself as he said it. 

Wayne shook his head. “Now, don’t you start that,” he said. “I’m telling you ‘cause I ain’t sure we should take it.” 

Eddie let himself slouch down. His head was starting to hurt and the trailer was cold. He furrowed his brow and let out an involuntary shiver. Wayne got up and pulled the crochet blanket off the back of the couch, tossing it over him. It helped a little. 

“You think we shouldn’t take the money?” he asked quietly. “Why?”

snippet here

Tagging: @vthx, @tinytalkingtina @sidekick-hero @sourw0lfs @penny00dreadful

@pearynice, @queenofshenanigans, @little-annie, @queenie-ofthe-void, @cloudsurfing42,

@felixir-of-moths, @steddiecameraroll, @hawkinsleather, @dame-zoom-a-lot, @pennyplainknits, @steddieas-shegoes, @cassaloopa, @just-my-latest-hyperfixation, @frankenstein-ate-my-left-shoe, @runninriot

Here's some context links for past sentences:

Crown of Thorns

Cat's in the Cradle

The Oracle of Roane County

Zeno's Paradox

[wordsandrobots]

While watching the sub of 08th MS Team over on Gundam Info's YouTube page (sans episode 12 because they are cowards), the thought suddenly occurred that you could move those characters into another of the shows with minimal effort, mostly because they are fairly stock and also because they're enough of a good unit dynamic to work elsewhere.

Obviously, because this is me, I was imagining them in Iron-Blooded Orphans, either as a Gjallarhorn squad in some dismal backwater (with Shiro eventually realising being a member of the colonial police kind of sucks) or as some unaffiliated mercenary group, with Aina perhaps being from Gjallarhorn and that making for a conflict.

And since I'm rubbish at AUs but always need a ready source of OC inspiration for my style of fic-writing, that got me wondering who else you could readily transpose into the Post Disaster timeline.

Obviously the Shangri-La kids from Gundam ZZ are a freebie since they're the most clear-cut precursors to Tekkadan as a concept. You'd barely have to change anything about them except removing the newtype abilities.

Likewise, the antagonistic characters from Gundam Wing swap over with ease because Gjallarhorn is just OZ if it won and then became entrenched for 300 years. Treize, Une, Noin and Zechs just need new uniforms and we're done. You could probably fold in the Gundam boys too, and likely with minimal reworking at that. Heero probably wouldn't be augmented in the same way, but make him a space rat and we're laughing. Quatre can be from the upper classes/colony company side of things, Trowa's human debris, give Duo a spacer/pirate origin and Wu Fei . . .

You know what, Wu Fei as the scion of some kind of warrior monk group that's been maintaining a Gundam since the Calamity War could have legs as a concept. Maybe I should file that one away for later use.

Kudelia already retreads a lot of Relena's schtick in a more pragmatic/cynical manner. Dorothy, however, would make a perfect member of Gjallarhorn high society and Sally can be another disgruntled soldier who comes to realise the money isn't worth it any more.

Gundam 00 is hit and miss. Setsuna is superseded in every way by Mikazuki in terms of character concept. The Innovades and super soldiers are right out. I already kind of imagine Gundam Flauros' original pilot as a variant of Neil!Lockon, though, and Graham is the kind of lunatic who can go with anything if you're not afraid of fun.

Gundam and Zeta Gundam . . . nah. They're just too tied into that original conceptualisation of what the series is about. I don't think the White Base or Argama crews really belong anywhere else. And I feel somewhat similarly about G Fighter, although maybe you could redo some of the stuff with the Devil Gundam to relate to the original IBO Gundam development process?

'Tis an interesting game at least and if anyone else has thoughts in this direction, I'd love to hear them.

[vax-official]

I sometimes wonder about what a 32-bit MS-DOS-like operating system would look like. There are a couple of interesting candidates out there (the now seemingly dead FreeDOS-32 and PDOS come to mind), but just for my own curiosity I would think about what needs to go into it.

And then I remember that modern operating systems don't boot via BIOS anymore, but via UEFI. And UEFI offers an API and a command line prompt, it runs from FAT and uses a Microsoft executable file format (PE)...

... Maybe UEFI and the UEFI shell are the modern 32-bit MS-DOS-like operating system I have thought about, huh!

[moonage-daydreamy]

for my mutuals who want to procrastinate on your work, here is a list of Video Essays to immerse yourself into:

The Queer Utopia of the Marauders Fandom | Video Essay (youtube.com)

booktok & the hotgirlification of reading (youtube.com)

Capitalism, Poverty, and Ratatouille (youtube.com)

Why Perfect Blue is Terrifying (youtube.com)

Whiplash vs. Black Swan — The Anatomy of the Obsessed Artist (youtube.com)

How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito (youtube.com)

Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Pretty (youtube.com)

Social Media's Obsession with Aesthetics and Curated Identities (youtube.com)

Howl's Moving Castle - an Underrated Masterpiece (youtube.com)

what makes gen z humor so interesting? (youtube.com)

everything wrong w/ "romanticize your life": eurocentrism, hedonism, unrealistic, etc. (youtube.com)

[mysticdragon3md3]

Human Nature, Hope & Ice Cream by Pop Culture Detective

[acti-veg]

I don't think the desert island argument is a valid criticism of veganism, but I think it could potentially be used as a valid criticism of the idea that all lives are equal. If you were on a desert island with a child and you had to kill animals to feed the child, many people, including vegans, would say this is morally necessary and the 'right' thing to do. So this would mean that all lives are not equal. You could say the child is only more valuable to you subjectively, and is not objectively

worth any more than the animals you kill to feed them. But in that case, does valuing the child’s life more than the animals’ really give you the right to kill them? Who says that your values are any more important than the animals’ values, who probably value their lives more than they value the child’s? The child’s life must objectively be more important, otherwise I’m not sure killing the animals to save the child can be justified?

The first thing to recognise is that value judgements, in the ethical sense, are always subjective. Such a thing cannot be measured or argued objectively. That said, there are really two different questions at play here:

1) Are human and non-human animal lives of equal value?

2) Do you value human and non-human lives equally?

These answers can both be different. You can believe that humans are superior to non-human animals, but value the life of your beloved pet over that of a fascist. You can believe that human and non-human lives are equally valuable, yet still value your own life more than theirs, to the point where you may kill them in a survival situation. There is nothing logically inconsistent about either position.

For your thought experiment, I don’t agree that killing the deer to feed the child means those lives are not equal, it means you value the life of the child over the deer, in the way we all tend to value our kin or members of our own group over complete strangers. This does not necessarily reflect our value judgments about those lives, or whether they are more or less valuable - all it means is that I valued that child’s life enough to kill for them. Had they been humans I’d killed, would make those other human lives less valuable? I’d argue not.

Value judgements will always be arbitrary, any attempt at reasoning them out will always end in circular logic, because it’s not a relational judgement. It’s justified only to the extent you can justify it to yourself and to others, but even had you chosen to let that child die to save the deer, your decision and your justification would be subject to the exact same criticism.

Under that outcome the question becomes: If their lives are equal, why did you let the child die? The justification for that decision would be just as arbitrary as the justification for its opposite. The only truly equal response would be to let both parties die equally, which would be even less justifiable than choosing one over the other on the basis of something arbitrary like kinship, personal sentiment or the desire to appear objective. Decisions between two equals will always be based on emotion and personal values more than logic, and so attempts to draw our logical conclusions from those decisions will always be fraught with problems.

[brightsuzaku]

ship of theseus paradox

For the following Situation: imagine that the power of time and space has been bent and looped around to make it work, because that's how crackships are gonna happen.

Imagine if the original Ship of Theseus could be shipped (romantically, etc) with the version of the Ship that was made of all replacement parts? By default this is a form of crackship, but how else could it be described?

Or, to make a poll about it:

PLEASE reblog to help this poll escape containment! My blog is otherwise pretty small! This is a very silly poll, I know.

Remember that I am talking about boats, so generally-speaking: there is no moral weight to be had overall, as these are hypothetical boats. This (relation)ship of Theseus is shipshape at best, worth sinking at worst.

Let's sail!

[drawfee-quot3s]

well this, this article. posits. that youu Can't prOve you didn't die last night

i-

- julia + jacob

[atmosphericradar]

This is a very revealing moment for how the modern AI community is thinking:

The question now is whether passing the Turing test even matters anymore. “It’s totally unclear whether this is a meaningful milestone or not,” said Mustafa Suleyman, a founder of DeepMind, now a division of Google, and the founder of Inflection.Ai, a startup making personal AI assistants. “It doesn’t tell us anything about what the system can do or understand, anything about whether it has established complex inner monologues or can engage in planning over abstract time horizons, which is key to human intelligence.”

This is both fair criticism of the Turing Test, and nothing new. Turing himself didn't think his experiment was a good judge of intelligence, either. Where is Suleyman going with this?

Suleyman argues that there’s a misplaced focus in the tech industry on the distant possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI: algorithms with cognitive abilities that match or exceed humans’. Instead, he said the more achievable and meaningful short-term goal is what he calls Artificial Capable Intelligence, or ACI: programs that can set goals and achieve complex tasks with minimal human intervention.

To measure whether a machine has [become an] ACI, he describes a “modern Turing test” — a new north star for researchers — in which you give an AI $100,000 and see if it can turn the seed investment into $1 million. To do so, the bot must research an e-commerce business opportunity, generate blueprints for a product, find a manufacturer on a site like Alibaba and then sell the item (complete with a written listing description) on Amazon or Walmart.com.

This major C-suiter in the field of AI just said that the best test of a being's intelligence is exploiting business opportunities.

Obviously the final goal for all of the present-day investment into AI is to generate a financial return. It's no surprise that businesses would salivate over AI that can independently come up with, market, and sell new products all on their own.

But think about what that intelligence test says about the mindset of the big-wigs in AI right now! If the true test of human-like intelligence is being able to turn a 10x profit, what does that say about humans who don't (or can't) make tons of money? If your parents came to you one day and said: "we honestly think you're sub-human because you don't make enough money for how much money went into raising you", that would be prestige-drama-villain behavior.

Rich people think that they are smarter and better than everyone else. It's no surprise that, on a philosophical level, investment-capitalist tech bros will idolize (and seek to re-create) technological investment-capitalism.

I have my own thought experiment: I wonder how many of these Fintech C-suiters has rich parents that gave them huge loans or high-paying jobs right out of school, and I wonder how that affected them later in life...

[maaruin]

Here is a moral dilemma that is IMO very similar to Omelas: Calvinist God exists, people are pre-destined for either heaven or hell. The majority will go to hell, and it is completely arbitrary who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.

Well, for all people except for you. You get to pick if you accept God and go to heaven or reject God and go to hell.

What do you choose?

[hey-its-sybarite]

Thanks this is gonna live rent free in my brain and consume my thoughts at random intervals I just know it.

Came back wrong this, came back monstrous that

What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.

[wintvies]

sorry if i was a bitch i probably wanted to go home

[tawnysoup]

Finally now that the comic is fully public on comicfury, I get to share it with all of you here, too <3

If you enjoyed, please consider supporting by buying a PDF of the comic on itch.io: https://tawnysoup.itch.io/home-in-the-woods

[caterjunes]

#tangential but this is also my beef with a lot of interpretations of#the ones who walk away from omelas#it's the smug refusal to engage with the philosophical problem on its own terms#it's answering the question you think SHOULD have been asked instead of the question that was asked (via birdadjacent)

The root of my frustration with a lot of trolley problem discourse is that 'What does it mean to act ethically in a world where shitty luck and the actions of strangers you'll never meet have left you without any purely good options?' is, like, possibly one of the most relevant and universally applicable questions moral philosophy might help answer.

Saying it's a bad question because it's the negligent trolley engineer's fault literally exactly misses the point - yes how to deal on a personal level with systems and infrastructure that designed without much care for human collateral damage is an incredibly useful thing to think about!