Carl-Richard

I consider myself an above average intuitive person, and when I personally see something that I feel is easily explained by plain facts, I find that intuition is not really needed. IMO, Intuition is reserved for cases where you make a decision based on relatively little information and where there is really no alternative. When the information is clear, you should know what to do. I also think it's useful to differentiate between the feeling of intuition and the feeling of wanting something to be true. It's very easy to trick yourself about these types of subtle mental phenomena. When in doubt, refer to the facts.

The alien zoologists who logged into this forum are probably having a lot of fun reading this . Consciousness ain't no mistake.

The habitable zone in respect to sunlight is not a dealbreaker. Europa gets a lot of energy from the tidal forces of Jupiter (not a star), and most planets have tons of energy within their core anyway, so you don't even need a star system at all. There are arguments that natural selection produced multicellular life because it conferred a substantial fitness advantage (cell differentiation -> division of labour -> decreased energy cost per cell). "An evolutionary accident" is one of the more pessimistic stances. If we take a more optimistic stance, maybe it's inevitable. We have to balance these probabilities with the fact that humanoid creatures have existed for a blip of evolutionary history (couple of million years). What if we got a billion year headstart? What if only a few planets got that headstart? Neil deGrasse Tyson said that one species could take over the entire galaxy in 10 million years (which is also just a blip). The "what if's" can go in either direction pretty fast.

The transition away from Newtonian mechanics (NM) into General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (GR and QM) is a lesson in relativity. The descriptions provided by NM are only useful relative to a certain scale of measurement. When you go to the very big or the very small, the models that you are able to use to describe the world changes, and it happens that NM is very anthropocentric (it only works within very human conditions; energy levels, speeds, distances etc.). The nature of things like energy, motion, time, particles, waves; all of that changes depending on your level of analysis. In that sense, QM and GR don't necessarily override NM, because there are cases where NM is sufficient to solve problems (like some basic engineering calculations).

You don't want to contribute to the spread of a highly contagious virus, even if the death rate is 0.0%. The more people get infected, the more it increases the odds of possible mutants with higher death rates. Even worse so, there is a possibility of so-called recombinant viruses which can have truly disastrous consequences. Say we have a hypercontagious virus (covid-19) that infects a cell that has already been infected by a very deadly virus (Ebola). The worst case scenario is a genetic recombination where you get a new virus which is both very contagious and very deadly. This is a real possibility which only increases in probability when you let a virus such as covid-19 run free in the population. We've been really lucky that all this started with a relatively innocuous virus, but that can all change in a heartbeat. Taking a vaccine or wearing a mask could not only save you but all of humanity.

Speaking of the devil, this came out yesterday: #252 - ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE? A Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/

What is evidence?

Alien denial is an ideology that goes hand-in-hand with the intraparadigmatic attitudes of pop science (cynicism and rigidity). Maybe when Pope-o-science Neil daddy Tyson changes his mind, maybe then we'll see some changes in the collective consciousness of neopositivists ?

I just gave you my citations: Ep. 5-6 of The Basement Office. The co-presenter, Nick Pope, worked for the UK Ministry of Defence for over 20 years.

Trying to guess their intentions is way different than merely acknowledging the possibility of their existence. For all we know, that would be like an ant trying to predict the next US election. We have no idea what level of intelligence we're dealing with.

Military personell found elevated levels of radioactivity inside the landing marks made by the craft. Ep. 5-6 of The Basement Office series on yt.

@Blackhawk How do you explain the Rendlesham UFO encounter?

I'm gonna work as a tester for covid19 this summer (I'll mostly be doing nasopharyngeal swabs, preparing tests and some IT tasks). I'll maybe share my experiences here over time (as far as it's legal to do so)

Exactly. It's a paradox

It's just a descriptive statement: such a teaching self-terminates. There is a reason why it doesn't exist among living beings. It's tautological. Teachings generally exist to dictate the life of human beings. Physical death as a prescription is antithetical to the very concept of teachings.

A teaching that promotes physical death is self-terminating.

Omg I thought it was Martin Ball ?

That was easy ?

You can compare anything with anything, but some things are easier to compare than others. 1960s and 1800s are not very comparable. Imagine trying to explain Foucault's philosophy to Rousseau.

NOTE: this is not an endorsement, just a curious inquiry. JF's argument is an evolutionary one and is essentially that welfare leads to selection of weakness, which is why we should shy away from collectivist ideologies (socialism) and adopt a firmly capitalist ideology. His argument seems strong on the surface, but I believe that SD can provide some context: Human society has been strongly collectivist for ~50 000 years (technically millions of years). Pre-agricultural tribal societies gave individuals a minimum safety threshold even though their value contribution was variable. Sure, if you were found out to be a leech, you would be cast out, but there are also systems in place for that today (e.g. welfare employment programs). Capitalism arose only after ~10 000 years of agricultural feudalism. If the weakness selection pressure argument holds up, JF must differentiate between archaic/tribal collectivism and modern/governmental collectivism (which I don't think he does in this conversation). He also prides himself on using a theory with few assumptions but underestimates the depth of each assumption. It's not that clear whether or not the selection pressure for weakness in one specific area (helping people in deep poverty) will dominate the wide range of selection that is made available by solving the problems that are in fact caused by deep poverty. Let's say JF got some welfare while he was poor. Would the JF we see today really be diminished because of that or would he actually have been enhanced? Let's say he skips 5 years of poverty and gets a headstart on his career compared to today. Even if we granted a level of weakness induced by having received welfare, wouldn't that headstart possibly be a net benefit? Stuff like that. The general conception is that his argument is rather strong but that he goes way overboard with the conclusions (given that he doesn't particularly specify the scale of the problem, only the possibility of its existence). It's true that even though welfare could provide net social benefit or even some evolutionary benefit, it could degenerate the entire system if the weakness selection is strong enough. Any other ways to come at this?

I shortened down my take on it: The original human societal organization was intensely collectivistic for the majority of evolutionary history (pre-agricultural, tribal societies), where a base minimum safety was provided for people with variable value contributions, and somehow that didn't lead to a dominant, self-terminating weakness phenotype. So-called "individualism" didn't come online before ~10 000 years ago (agricultural, feudal empires), and the less exploitative version of that (capitalism) came even later. The supposed selection pressures created from a couple centuries or millenia of individualism is comparatively speaking homeopathic to the millions of years of collectivism from our evolutionary history. JF must 1. clarify why modern collectivism would be more detrimental than archaic collectivism, and 2. clarify the exact level of expression that would create a dominant, self-terminating phenotype. So far, he has provided a couple of big "ifs" but relatively few "hows".

Strong

Try a couple of trips of longer-acting substances while working yourself up in dose. The specifics is up to you.