theunearthedman

[theunearthedman]

Common misconception, but not really, no. The way the experiment is characterized as proving consciousness is because the behavior of light changes when observed. The idea that it proves the metaphysical world is largely based on the use of the word "observed". In the colloquial sense "observed" means, more or less, "accounted by a living being." The implication is that it is the living being and their awareness of the particle/wave that changes the way it behaves. This is an error of assumed causation. It is not our observation that causes the light to behave differently, but it is the interference necessary to observe. I haven't looked too much into it beyond this, but my understanding is that since the only means we have of measuring individual photons (or anything at that scale) is electromagnetic in nature, and it interferes with light, this proves that light has electromagnetic properties, but since light has electromagnetic properties and we have to use electromagnetics to detect it, we cannot detect light in a way that does not interfere with it. That's the crux of that second part of the experiment.

The double slit experiment is possibly the most haunting in all physics in terms of its metaphysical implications and it's crazy most people don't know about it beyond "this proves light is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave". It's about as close as you can come to proving in a lab that the metaphysical world exists

[theunearthedman]

*through gritted teeth* every day i choose to be kind *barely restraining myself from violence* i choose to have compassion *tamping down the vicious bloodlust inside me* i choose to care and to be kind and to love

[theunearthedman]

All of the above is quite important, but I think we should also consider why this legislation has been proposed. It's not because "climate protection bad". It's because under the current definitions (and the definitions in several other environment-conscious acts beside), protected water includes artificial waterways designed for agricultural and industrial use. This causes so. Much. Hassle. And so. Much. Paperwork. So much unnecessary red tape that just makes it harder to produce basic goods because the EPA is interfering in largely self-contained, private systems. It also allows the government to claim control of private property because a local farmer dug an irrigation ditch that is a tad too large.

To be clear, I don't think stripping protection away from wetlands is a good idea. There's got to be a better way to reform the definition. But the definition needs to change.

They're wanting to change the definition of water to see which water would qualify under the Clean Water Act...I wish I was making this up.

What this means, in layman's terms, is that not all water or wetlands would be under environmental protections, so some could legally be dumped in, scraped out of, or otherwise harmed.

The comment period for this is pretty short (just a few days left!) so please submit comments asking for ALL water to be protected.

[theunearthedman]

Kierkegaard, right? Based

Huge shout to my friend from an undergraduate philosophy program who started working out every single day, not for health benefits or to become conventionally attractive or whatever, but because -- and this is a direct quote -- he was concerned that otherwise he might "become lost in the world of signs and forget the things they signify". I have thought about this every single time that I've worked out since.

[theunearthedman]

Anyway, the woman saw that the apple was good.

Sin has always been choosing the wrong good.

That's why people miss the point when they say "Well, X can't be a sin, because it's good in these ways!" And they similarily miss the point when they say that "X can't be good, because (excess or misuse of X) is a sin!"

You may eat of any tree in the garden except for that of sin. If you eat of it, you will die.

[theunearthedman]

For completeness' sake chromosomes don't cut it. We also need to know whether or not they have Congenital Androgen Insensitivity. If they do they're female whether they're XX or XY. Not that that's not something we can test for from conception and therefore not an issue with the law at hand, but it is relevant and the sort of thing that gets left out probably too often. A lot of conservatives forget, chromosomes are epistemological, they help us know someone's biological sex, they are not the end-all-be-all in terms of determining it. If they were, the existence of a rare few sex-chromosome trisomic people would disprove the sexual binary.

This is the funniest blunder ever i'm--

Where's the science side of tumblr to debunk this lol.

Congrats everyone!

[theunearthedman]

Okay so right off the bat I should probably open by mentioning that if GenAI had a mouth I'd stuff it with shards of glass. Hate the stuff. A lot of this though is a natural consequence of increased processing power and has little to do with AI specifically.

First, energy usage. I'm sorry but this is unreasonable. Current estimates on our rate of population increase via immigration are putting a greater net strain on US energy consumption than AI. We're not increasing coal and gas usage to make up for AI specifically, we're increasing coal and gas usage because the federal government has crippled our ability to increase our power output in accordance with population and the degree to which our population relies on technology. This was going to happen anyway.

Also, importantly, our current power crisis was completely avoidable, regardless of population or AI, if there weren't so many restrictions on nuclear power. We can produce cheap, reliable power with less waste than fossil fuels, less footprint than solar or wind farms, and less actual physical restrictions on placement than geothermal if we just went nuclear. It wouldn't even take weapons-grade stuff to do it, we have nuclear rods that are useless for bombs. This is literally just the government's fault.

Also data centers aren't limited to AI. Santa Clara has so many data centers because it's literally Silicon Valley. That's where all the American tech companies are centered. The servers are all there. All the websites, all the data, all the AI too, yes, but there are several different things housed in those data centers, many of which I assure you you don't want gone.

As for the water... Yeah idk as much about that that does sound actually pretty scummy screw that

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

[theunearthedman]

Doug Wilson is generally pretty reliable, though he's written a little about basically everything and doesn't specialize in those issues.

Kevin DeYoung isn't my favorite stylistically but in my limited experience I haven't found anything in him that overmuch disturbs my sensibilities. I seem to recall he was under fire for some reason (He might have been mentioned in Shepherds for Sale), but that cursory examination didn't bother me much.

Michael Kruger I've heard recommended highly, I'm going to be reading his Surviving Religion 101 pretty soon (was a gift several years ago) but I'm not sure how much he'll address social issues as opposed to secularism in general.

But you're right, there aren't nearly as many. The way Mrs. Butterfield put it is that the men generally have things to lose, whereas she doesn't really. Frankly it's disappointing, but I don't have enough life experience to write about it myself so I just deal with it. One day, maybe.

do y’all have any current male resources on the theology of cultural issues (sexuality, abortion, etc.) who are as thorough as women like Allie B. Stuckey, Rosaria Butterfield, Nancy Pearcey, Alisa Childers, et al?

[theunearthedman]

Always glad to engage in civil discussion!

As to the pragmatic nature of the contract, I agree with your statement that violating a contract voids the protections of the contract, but there's a difference between no longer being owed the benefits of the contract and being owed an action in opposition.

Let's take a mundane example like basic table manners. Etiquette dictates that one does not talk with food in one's mouth. Should one choose to do so unaware or in spite of this convention, they are in violation of the social contract of etiquette. That doesn't mean we're obligated all of a sudden to treat them like barbarians. We're not obligated to invite them over to dinner again or to comment positively on their manners, but we are also assuredly not obligated to throw them out and smack them in the face.

But the statement is that intolerance should not be tolerated. At first glance this would seem to fit with the above principle, except that tolerance is defined by being philosophically negative. It's the restraint of any adverse reaction, the exercise of patience, the lack of action in response to offensive or painful stimulus. To avoid the philosophically negative, then, is to take positive action, and the language used is one of moral responsibility. If they are within the contract this moral responsibility can be explained by the responsibility to keep one's word, but since the premise is that they are without the contract, there must be an exterior moral driver to motivate the responsibility. Action is being mandated to those outside of the contract, therefore the contract is not the agent of the mandate.

Ergo, there is a moral law being appealed to outside of the contract, ergo, either tolerance is a moral standard or it's derivative of a moral standard.

I don't think the social contract argument solves this problem because the end goal of pragmatic measures is either amoral, which means I can't support it on moral grounds, or it is to a moral end. But the argument makes no claims about what that moral end is. There are people out there who really believe that tolerance is the highest moral good, there are people who view tolerance as a method of introducing social change by gradation but who have the end goal of intolerance of any view but their own, there are people who think tolerance makes possible tenets of their individual moralities. My issue with the social contract is that it's trying to build a second story on a building whose foundations aren't set. It doesn't hold up to the fundamental question of "why?" because it is remarkably obtuse about the standard which it seeks to uphold, and therefore cannot be argued from first principles, and is therefore logically unsound. If the value was individualism, and the argument was that tolerance allows the most people to live their lives the closest to their ideal, that is a moral standard with the potential for a logically sound argument (I don't buy into utilitarianism so I don't agree, but it has the potential to be a consistent stance). But the argument advocates for tolerance without appealing to a specific reason. The statement that tariffs are good can only be refuted (as it ought to be) if we have a standard for what is good. Similarly, the statement that tolerance is good can only be affirmed if we have a standard for what is good, but unlike the Nietzschean Fascists, the Anarchists, the Papists, and the Communists, advocates of tolerance advocate for it without a unified stance on what they aim to achieve.

To preempt the astute observation that this does read slightly differently from my previous comments (at the expense of becoming even more longwinded): my first wall of text (sorry btw) makes the case that the moral standard is tolerance for the sake of simplicity. It is possible to appeal to another moral standard, as this reply clarifies, but this appeal must justify the moral obligation to take action against those who exit the contract. If the tolerance is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself, there will inevitably be a point where abandoning tolerance is better suited to achieving that end than abiding by the stipulations of the social contract. Therefore exterior moral standards cannot justify taking action against those who violate the contract as a universal principle, which is what the statement indicates. Therefore the moral standard must be perfectly in line with tolerance, therefore the moral standard must be tolerance.

Again, sorry for the text wall, and thank you for the quick and interesting reply! I would like to consider your point on the possible equivocation here but unfortunately I'm book for basically the rest of today and am out of time to go into it. Happy New Year!

[theunearthedman]

Inhales

Actually no. The argument falls apart in at least three places, but at the moment I'm going to cover specifically the inclusion of the word "should" in that final phrase "should NOT be tolerated".

"Should", according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is a word "Used to express obligation or duty", i.e. a statement of positive morality. To put it tautologically, one is morally obligated to do the things one should do.

This gets at the fundamental flaw of the argument: it's a red herring. The fact that the social contract exists is in no way relevant to the existence of a moral structure except insofar as the social contract appeals to the moral structure to justify participation in it. Is there a social contract of tolerance? Yes. Is there a moral standard of tolerance? Also yes. This is made abundantly clear by the presence of the word should. There is a value statement being made, therefore, there is a value to which one appeals. If it is universal tolerance, we are brought back to the Paradox and the argument achieves nothing. If it is not universal tolerance, if instead the underlying moral philosophy is for example critical theory and the liberation of the oppressed, than tolerance is a pragmatic standard instead of a moral one and we should talk about the real moral system behind it first and leave practicalities to be discussed by those who agree on the goal. It's like trying to get Jefferson and Keynes to agree on tax policy: obfuscating the goal in hopes of making it more palatable to intellectual opponents only makes it harder to reach.

[theunearthedman]

Though returning to this, I recall that in its technical proposition the question is whether or not Statement 1 is true, not the system as a whole, but the same principle applies. If Statement 1 is true, Statement 1 is false, which does not logically cohere, therefore Statement 1 is false. The fact that Statement 1's falsehood also invalidates itself is irrelevant, because there is no requirement that false statements logically cohere

Philosophical hot take (apparrently? shouldn't be): Truth is inherently logical. Also all nontrue statements are false. Therefore this series of statements:

The following statement is false

The previous statement is true

Is false because it is illogical, and therefore untrue. I don't know why people are so worked up about this.

[theunearthedman]

Philosophical hot take (apparrently? shouldn't be): Truth is inherently logical. Also all nontrue statements are false. Therefore this series of statements:

The following statement is false

The previous statement is true

Is false because it is illogical, and therefore untrue. I don't know why people are so worked up about this.

[theunearthedman]

Every year people (esp. parents) ask me what I want for Christmas, and every year my answer gets closer to

"I want peace; yes, I’d sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace."

which is a. true and b. completely and entirely unhelpful. Like yeah, no duh, but are there things that would make you happier?

[theunearthedman]

On the assumption that Calculus is vaguely analogous to an A level math course, I made it to 31. I think like a third of these were just based on the fact that pop isn't my genre and another quarter were just... things I was born with.

[theunearthedman]

By the time I get back to reading this it'll be too late for the decision that prompted the question, but thought I'd ask from advice from your friendly neighborhood Tumblr Christians: I'm praying for wisdom about an issue, but before I can finish my mind keeps interjecting with the opinion I had beforehand. Is this generally a positive sign or a negative one? Thanks for the help

[theunearthedman]

The telos of any fictional character must include, though it need not be limited to, entertainment. If art does not entertain, whether it be an audience or the creator, it has failed. The greatest sin in writing is not being unrelatable; it's being boring.

[theunearthedman]

I fully believe we will still have competition in heaven. We'll still run races, have wrestling matches, throw balls of every kind. There will still be trivia nights (well, not nights, but y'know), art competitions, storms, there might even be debates about which perfectly good and beautiful color is better (It's green). There's nothing inherently bad about competition, and I believe we're going to get an even better version in the world to come.