Scholar

I found this on the Destiny reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1gljw0t/its_worth_pointing_out_that_a_30_point_shift/ One commenter posted this:

They will blame the democrats.

That's not even the worst. The bad part is that there is no accountability whatsoever. People don't care if they are sold misinformation, even if you show them that it was blatant misinformation. There is no shame, no need to adjust your epistemic standards so you don't embarass yourself again, because nobody will think it is embarassing in the first place. After all, the other side does it too, is what they think, and therefore we have to protect our own even if sometimes they lie. Like Leo said in the blogpost, people genuinely do not care about truth anymore, even less so now than 10 years ago.

I don't care much about the topic, but I don't think it's unreasonable that aliens might exist and observe us. Most people who are self-proclaimed rationalists do not dismiss the UFO phenomena because they evaluated the genuine possibility or impossibility of such things, but merely engage in peer-pressure driven cultural enforcement. Most human beings are profoundly susceptible to peer pressure. You can test this by looking at the arguments people provide against the phenomenon, like there not being clear footage despite everyone owning a smartphone. It's frustrating that people will literally not think past whatever confirms their biases, because it should be obvious to anyone who used a smartphone that you can't take high quality images of anything that is even moderately far away. I haven't done much research, but given what is reported in the Nimitz encounters, it seems the only reasonable explanation is aliens, or there is some effort to spread falsehood. Epistemically, I find it dubious that most people dismiss that case. If what was reported is true, then in my view the explanation of extraterrestials probably outweighs most other explanations that people like to provide, in terms of likelihood.

I explained to you why the reasoning is laughable. Anything could be the case. Maybe each one of your skin cells suffers when they die. Maybe your liver is having a depression. Maybe different parts of your brain have their own conscious experience. All of these would make more sense than plants feeling pain and fear in response to being uprooted. You are conflating existence with pain. Pain is a very particular substance with a very particular function. To remove substances of mind from their function simply shows how naive your view of consciousness is.

How do you guys go about processing a friend's suicide?

I want to see footage.

It's not in any way a rise and fall, it is an upward trend that sometimes has dips.

Yes I am experienced in meditation and have some experiences with psychedelics, although not extensive. My only proper trip was 150mcg LSD. I plan to use more psychedelics in the future but it seems fairly risky in my case. Yes, most fear of sexual degeneracy today stems from a sense of unfamiliarity and disgust, and a desire for social coherence. Incestophobia is a good example of this today. I like to use it because it still applies to most people. People are profoundly concerned and reactionary to such things, however once you get to know a couple who engages in such a thing, and you realize they are like any other couple, it becomes much harder to maintain such judgmental stances. With transphobia and "Onlyfans"-Phobia, you see the same phenomenon. People will be disgusted at such things, and then justify their disgust through various concerns about society and those individuals who might be negatively affected. Such concerns might carry some validity, but what you will notice is a complete lack of genuine empathy for those individuals, even though it is supposedly about a concern for their well-being in the first place. The blatant lack of compassion becomes obvious when you hear them dismiss the suffering of such individuals or dehumanize them in various ways. They mock, shame and seek to demonize such things, rather than have a genuine discussion about risks and potential problems. This makes a genuine conversation about risks, and solution to potential problems, much harder. A lot of this is a function of normalcy. When culture changes, it alienates those who are entrenched in the culture. It fundamentally creates a sense of obsolescence, and challenging the norms with which individuals grew up with often feels to them like an attack on their identity. Anything that is norm-challenging in a real way will lead a reactionary response. Sadly this applies to most human beings, not merely conservatives.

It's not. The function of pain is to have an immediate reactivity to a stimulus, namely to move away from it. There is no point in an experience of suffering or torment if an organism does not interact with the world in an immediate, decision based way. An animal is reactive to dozens of stimulus as it navigates the world. There is one decision center which must at any given point decide which action is best to be taken on the basis of several feeds of information: Temperature, location, pain, hunger, social dynamics, threat recognition etc All of these feeds have to, at all points, be taken into account to evaluate what action you should take. For example, you might feel pain and hunger at the same time. Maybe you need to do something painful to be able to clench your hunger? How do you know which one of those actions is appropriate to take? Well, it depends on the amount of pain you feel. Damaging the body, by falling down a cliff or eating yourself, is not worth it to eat something that does not provide you a lot of calories. This kind of balancing act is what individuated consciousness is. Plants have absolutely zero necessity for such an individuated consciousness. They do not have to make complex decisions in real time that are contextually sensitive. Rather, they can simply act according to basic reactivity to immediate stimulus. In simple ways, there is no reason for a plant to feel pain when you cut it, because it cannot take any action to avoid that stimulus. The reason why you feel pain when you put your hand on a hot stove is because you can instantly pull back your hand. There is a profound ignorance in people who compare plant consciousness to animal consciousness, as the above described things should be immediately obvious if you think about the topic for more than a few seconds.

As society becomes more free, it also grows more sophisticated. In a simple sense, greater freedom will require greater consciousness. But part of how greater consciousness is generated is through greater freedom, because by being confronted with new problems and dynamics, solving these issues becomes part of your growth. The conservative mind fears uncharted territory because it will bring with it new challenges. But they fail to realize that these new challenges will be overcome, and overcoming them is what makes us grow as a species. Too much freedom would of course dissolve society and lead to anarchy. This is why progress comes in steps. Think of it like a child. You want to protect the child from killing himself, so you have to limit his freedom. But you have to give him just enough freedom such that he can learn from his mistakes and grow as a person. This comes with risks. There is always a chance of catastrophic mistakes, but some of that chance is required to move foarward and grow. You wait until the child grows more and more sophisticated, to adopt more and more responsibility, such that he will be able to handle more and more freedom. This is why we limit the autonomy of children, because they are not grown enough to handle such freedom yet. My point here is that, yes the challenges you describe are real, but the mistake here is to want to go "back to comfort", back to the past. Firstly, this is simply not going to happen because todays evolution is driven not through culture but technology, and secondly it is not going to lead to growth. You want to actually face the challenges and solve them, such that our societies grow and individuals with them grow. The biggest challenges we face are basically the result of the internet. Most problems we face today that seem dire are a result of that, even our inability to tackle other problems like climate change. Like I said, there is no going back now. It's essential to realize the opportunity cost. Conservatives are basically completely wasting our time and energy that we need to spend to actually fix these existential problems. By making the conversation about delusions of going back, we are failing to have to conversations of how to move forward. Here is the crux: The problems we are facing are novel problems that emerge as a result of societal and technological evolution. The solutions that the conservatives try to provide are fundamentally inapplicable, because the solutions of the past are precisely the solutions that have already failed. Not only did they fail, they simply are not even addressing the new problems we are facing, because these solutions were designed to solve problems of the past. A conservative stance is important but it must be good faith. Today conservatives, coopted by social media, are just emotionally driven children, who delude themselves into fear-based fantasies. Right now they do not fulfill their societal function, but actually contribute to the erosion of conservative values. If you look at Destiny, he is basically what a good conservative should look like. Protecting the validity of the institutions and advocating for basic liberalism.

The reason was that you had to have children to ensure your survival in an agricultural society. You can't just have one of your children go "Well I don't want to have sex with women/men sorry, not gonna give you any grandchildren!". Both the survival of the child was compromised (people relied on offspring for their survival) as was as the parent who also relies on his grandchildren for survival. There are all sorts of other reasons but I think this was the main driver of homophobia. Basically, homophobia served the same function as heterosexuality in general serves, ensuring that individuals have children. Most people are repulsed by homosexual behavior (that's what heterosexuality is), as they are with for example incestuous behavior. The moral norms are then a result of an unconscious bias.

Wide-spread aberrant sexual behavior doesn't really cause any of this, it's the falling away of survival pressures that are causing the decline in procreation. Not only do you have contraceptions today, there is simply no incentive to create a family beyond a personal aspiration to do so. Humans were not designed by nature to decide when to have families, rather we naturally would have families as a result of our sexual behavior. The solution here will never be stopping "aberrant" sexual behavior. People could have no sex at all and they might still not choose to have families. Solving this issue will require far deeper solution than blaming it on deviancy. Progress is a function of human will. You can think of it this way: Natural pressures (war, nature, etc) force limitations upon humans in relation to survival, meaning humans have to neglect and suppress their idiosyncratic tendencies in favor of a behavior that will fit into the goal of surviving in a society. This kind of suppression always comes with a certain resistance, given that their will cannot express itself. To maintain this suppression requires a force that is greater than the resistance caused by suppressing that type of behaviors. For example, homosexuality was deemed illegitimate in the past because to survive required you to have a certain amount of children. Everyone was invested in upholding that norm because the survival pressure was real and constant. If all of your children did not have children, that would compromise your survival and their survival. Given that homosexuality does not lead to offspring, such behavior was unacceptable in such a context. Only an elite class could afford to deem such things acceptable, or not a violation of their masculinity. As survival pressures subsided, such norms naturally became challenged because the reasons to maintain them were gone. Human will can therefore express itself more freely than it could before. This is basically what progress is, a freeing of the will of mankind in relation to subsiding survival pressures. Conservatism is an often misguided survival function, which therefore has to be constantly challenged such that we do not restrict the will of humans for unnecessary reasons, and therefore violating their liberty and dignity. In the end, all of civilization is an attempt to express and maximally express human will. This is why some ideologies fundamentally fail once they cease to best express human will, such as religion. Today's ideologies fail in that they compromise human will by creating actors who inevitably behave and think in ways that compromises their own will. In regards to the nature of will, and how it evolves, it is basically a fundamental function of mind or consciousness, and it will flow towards expressing itself such that the least amount of friction within itself is caused. An individual relates to the collective, and the collective relates to the individual, in such a way that a sort of universal expression of will is achieved, that over time removes frictions. You have to understand here that we are talking about natural forces. Suffering is friction, metaphysically speaking, and the whole point of suffering to the cessation of itself. This means that over time the natural progression will be the resolution of friction. That is the motion of history.

The issue is that radicalization occurs because the other side, conservatives, are mocking and threatening the completely valid and basic human dignity of those affected minorities. Conservatives will use "concern" like yours to invalidate the whole movement, identity and rights of those individuals. They will use empirical data to justify their discriminiation, attitudes of dismissal and so forth. This is why there is a tendency to fight around the empirical data and to not give an inch to conservatives. If you admit there is a problem, the conservatives will use that to completely destroy all valid things that come with that movement, because fundamentally conservaties function through normalcy. They want to maintain the status quo, and they are fundamentally fearful of cultural changes. They are blind to the fact that culture has and will always changed, significantly. You are falling into this same trap when you make up horror stories about how civilization might collapse if we challenge gender norms or our ideas around reproduction. You are turning a trivial issue, that will have problems that will correct themselves if humans simply relate consciously to it, and turning it into a fear based existential problem. Turning something into an existential problem in the end will do nothing but fuel irrational conservative fears and further radicalize the left. Remember, the demographic collapse is occuring in every country on this planet, it has nothing to do with radical progressive culture around reproductive acts. These kinds of fear based narratives are doubly dangerous because they make us unable to recognize the actual real root cause problems and dynamics that we need for them to be solved. So ironically, on a systemic level, it is your attitude that leads to a fundamental threat to human civilization that is a recipe for disaster. This is what the conservative mind is, you have to realize that this framework of mind is in no way less dangerous than the radical progressive mindset. It just appears to be less dangerous on the surface, especially if you in particular benefit from the status quo. Those who do not benefit from the status quo will have no reason to accept your values. Which is why radical progressives often times reject the status quo completely, and might throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is because most people didn't adopt these things because they progressed as human beings, but simply because they sought to fit into their social group. This is the danger of stage green shaming tactics. If human progresses is based on fear rather than transcendence of old values through recognition of their limitations, then you only get a fascade of progress. This is why there have been so many "ex-progressive" during Trump era times, like Dave Rubin and his ilk. Green was tryng to force progress too much while being far too dysfunctional itself. I have been talking about this for years now. Most of this dysfunction was fueled by social media.

The irony is that most of science actually is that which was falsified. By falsifying things, we get closer to the truth.

The fundamental problem is that nobody has time to educate all of these people. It's impossible, low quality information is far easier to produce than what it takes to dismantle it.

Calling you guys neanderthals is an insult to neanderthals, as Spiritual correctly pointed out.

The guy sounds like an absolute neanderthal.

I don't know what morality has anything to do with this. You're a child.

You should see the doctor and get checked for brainrot.

If you think this was the message of Kojima, you should probably play the game again lol. He was saying the exact opposite.

I don't know what's worse. The fact that Trump is trying to dismantle US democracy, or the fact that he got the chance to do it twice now. Your country is absolutely fucked.

You realize this is a move that could destroy the US democracy? You guys are taking your institutions for granted. They are not solid, they never have been, there is no such thing. They can be weakened and eroded like any other thing in the universe.

That's very true. Also: Only barbarians find a barbarian charming.