One of the transfiguration safety rules: Never transfigure something into anything that might be eaten or breathed. Is it possible to demonstrate partial transfiguration (on, for example, his father’s rock) while transforming much of its substance very temporarily into a breathable gas?
occlude
Karma: 177
I’ve found The Art of Charm Podcast valuable in helping me overcome mild social anxiety and in being more confident generally. The podcast has its roots in the pickup community (which is particularly evident in its early episodes), but has morphed into more of a “men’s lifestyle” show.
Do you have written something that explain that evidence in more detail?
Clicked around out of curiosity and found what appears to be a cursory explanation for Aron’s belief in Jesus’ resurrection here. First impression is that he has treated NT accounts of Jesus as though they were written by several separate eyewitnesses (in other words, as they’re represented in the Bible and by modern Christian churches) and may not be aware of alternative explanations of the origins of the gospels by historians. Lukeprog’s journey might be illuminating.
You’re not alone. I also find her music strangely compelling.
Robin ultimately calculates that he is probably not a sim in this post. Much like the variables in the Drake equation, Robin’s probability estimates are built on a number of unknowns, so we really can’t do the calculation. But I have to admit that my own logic failed to take any of these variables into consideration, so please ignore that part of the grandfather.
Check out Occam’s Razor. The Simulation Hypothesis requires that a real, physical universe exists, and that someone is simulating another universe within that “real” universe. P(our universe is a simulation within a “top level” universe) < P(ours is the “top level” universe), given no further evidence of simulation. The God hypothesis (typically) assumes the existence of a complex, sentient being—not really a simple explanation when known physical laws can describe our observations.
Seconded.
.Please look around you. Does it look like we have got dumber in the last 20,000 years? I’d say this is tons of data. It may be hard to estimate in Bayesian terms, but certainly not less than +100 db of evidence against the alternative.
What I see when I look around is largely the product of millenia of cumulative invention and discovery.
If all you know about two mammals is that they have different brain sizes, then it seems plausible to guess that the one with the larger brain (especially if the brain is larger by mass and as a ratio to body size) has greater overall functionality. This doesn’t seem like a particularly privileged hypothesis, just the baseline observation.
This thing you call a “map”, conscious experience, is part of the “territory”—part of reality—which itself is supposed to be coextensive with physics.
This is interesting, true, and really complicates any quest to maintain an accurate map.
Upvoted (the OP too). I think some of your interlocutors may be thinking past you here, in the sense that they have dismissed your central point as a triviality. But there are fundamental differences between interactions of particles in the open universe, the state changes that particle interactions cause in our sensory machinery, and what it feels like to be a brain having an experience. The suggestion that the experience of green might be illusory fails to consider that it is something occurring in a physical brain. In this sense, the most dismissive thing we might say about any quale is that it doesn’t have the meaning we readily assign to it, but that’s different from a claim of nonexistence.
I’m not philosophically sophisticated enough to judge whether this observation implies dualism. I think perhaps we’d find a lot more common ground if we discussed our expectations rather than our definitions (especially given the theological baggage that the term dualism carries).
I only see three options. Deny that anything is actually green; become a dualist; or (supervillain voice) join me, and together, we can make a new ontology.
Sure I’ll join you; what color is the supervillain sidekick’s uniform?
Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven’t read through the entirety of a thread that’s gotten totally monstrous.
Ah, apologies if I’ve completely missed the point (which is entirely possible).
I get exactly the same result.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn’t count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he’s somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won’t take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn’t absolute proof that the switch wasn’t turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam’s Razor. If your best explanations are “the Hand of Zeus” and “Mittens, my cat,” then …
I’m not an expert, but with this in mind it should be a rather simple matter to apply a few strategies so that LW shows up near the top of relevant search results. At the very least we could create wiki pages with titles like “How to Think Better” and “How to Figure Out What’s True” with links to relevant articles or sequences. The fact that rationality has little obvious commercial value should work in our favor by keeping competing content rather sparse.
“Ish,” yes. I have to admit I’ve had a hard time navigating this enormous thread, and haven’t read all of it, including the evidence of demonic influence you’re referring to. However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book, and that 2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Two equally unlikely propositions should require equally strong evidence to be believed. Neither dragons nor demons exist, yet you assert that demons are real. Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind? Honest truth-seeking is about dispassionately scrutinizing that chain, as an outsider would, and allowing others to scrutinize, evaluate, and verify it.
I was a Mormon missionary at 19. I used to give people copies of the Book of Mormon, testify of my conviction that it was true, and invite them to read it and pray about it. A few did (Most people in Iowa and Illinois aren’t particularly vulnerable to Mormonism). A few of those people eventually (usually after meeting with us several times) came to feel as I did, that the book was true. I told those people that the feeling they felt was the Holy Spirit, manifesting the truth to them. And if that book is true, I told them, then Joseph Smith must have been a true prophet. And as a true prophet, the church that he established must be the Only True Church, according to Joseph’s revelations and teachings. I would then invite them to be baptized (which was the most important metric in the mission), and to become a member of the LDS church. One of the church’s teachings is that a person can become as God after death (omniscience and omnipotence included). Did the chain of reasoning leading from “I have a feeling that this book is true” justify the belief that “I can become like God”?
You are intelligent and capable of making good rhetorical arguments (from what I have read of your posts in the last week or two). I see you wielding Gendlin, for example, in support of your views. At some level, you’re getting it. But the point of Gendlin is to encourage truth-seekers desiring to cast off comforting false beliefs. It works properly only if you are also willing to invoke Tarski:
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Is that a worldwide prediction?
I won’t argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist—some state of a region of the universe—then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
I’ve thought of this advice to keep identity small as installing a new executive-level program, “Monitor group affiliations with potentially mind-killing emotional attachments”. Since I’ve done that, it seems like all my attachments have become a lot more gooey.